Frenzy

Part Three

Eichord

The fact that Eichord had detected a wise guy or an ex-con or whatever breed of felonious monk the non-existent Mr. Streicher might or might not prove to be, would have been insufficient to pull Jack to St. Louis. The gangland type action might not have reached out for him. It was a thing of one too many coincidences. Bad vibes. Rankling hunches. The St. Louis kills were firebombings. Some shootings. But no EYEBALL M. O. No ballistics, forensics, or any other hard information linked the California assassinations and the St. Louis murders.

The randomness of the kills were, however, a factor in themselves. The St. Louis homicide reports told of brutal and what appeared to be unconnected slayings. They could be strictly gangland stuff. But like the L.A. area murders the media attention was noteworthy. When you add to this factoring the coincidental sighting of a definite wise guy leaving the Coast for St. Louis, Eichord thought it might be worth a look.

He was coming in superficially just as he had in L.A., at a summons from the Task Force. But this time he would not be a cherry to be picked, chewed, pitted, and spit out. He'd not be manipulated again by "liaison" smoothies. He'd come in quietly. Unannounced to all but the local honcho. No VIP stuff. He'd ease on in and look around. Check it out his own way.

Jack had fond memories of the St. Louis he could recall from the couple of good years he'd lived there a quarter-century ago. But from the second the cab left Lambert he might as well have been on Mars.

Similarly he found himself unprepared for the Special Division, a compact unit working out of the Homicide Bureau at Twelfth and Clark downtown, now Twelfth and Tucker Boulevard. He found the burg largely unrecognizable, this town he'd called home in the 60s, in Plaza Square, not two blocks from the Division HQ.

Homicide occupied the fourth floor of the six-story building where Chief Adler ran his command post for the Metropolitan Saint Louis area. This was the headquarters for the detectives assigned to the nine St. Louis Police divisions.

The city was a completely different ball game than he remembered. Gone was the old, infamous Pruett-Igo, where two-man cars eventually became open game for snipers. But there were still low-income housing projects in heavily black areas north of the city. Still pockets of unrest and crime. It would take some time to get used to the absence of Gaslight Square, and the wide open Strip. De Baliviere Strip had been notorious back in the druggy 60s, a hot tenderloin of street-corner smack dealers and hookers flagrantly offering their wares. Now De Baliviere, the Seventh Police District — was all rehabs and pricey condos. And the only dope was being sold by $200,000-a-year professional men.

He thought the Bureau looked like a city room of a very-laid-back metro newspaper, or the offices of a prestigious yuppie insurance agency. The cops looked like schoolteachers or ad men for an ultra-conservative house account. Anything but coppers. Only the eyes and the holstered Smiths said different.

"Good morning, Jack, glad to have you aboard," his new temporary boss said with a half-smile in an exchange of the initial pleasantries.

The district commander, under whom Eichord would nominally be working, was out of the city taking an FBI-agent-taught course sanctioned by the University of Virginia, and the acting shop head was Lieutenant Victor Springer, whom Eichord found distant and routinely polite, as if meeting Jack was 361 on a list of 362 things he had to do that day, which it probably was.

"Come on in. You settled yet?"

"No," Eichord said, "I just came in this morning."

There was the ritual of getting coffee. The usual exchange of amenities. The obligatory comments about Eichord's track record and the expected questions about his fame and the Chicago case. The comments about lodging, the bread-and-butter basics of payroll stuff, where he'd sit, his temporary place in the scheme of things. Then Springer laid it out for him.

"As you know, we have what appears to be the beginning of a full scale gang war on our hands."

"Yeah."

"These mob killings have up until recently been just that — within the crime factions. Wise guys taking down other wise guys. So we thought. But then there was the shooting at Laclede Landing." Springer shoved a newspaper across the desk. "I saved that one." The headline said Two Injured In Saint Louis Mob Shoot-out. Replete with front-page crime-scene photo.

"Mayor Carrol Donovan told St. Louis Police Commissioner Powell, 'Instruct the police department it either cleans this mess up or their replacements will. This city will no longer tolerate an atmosphere of violence,' " Eichord read aloud.

"Well, Jack, you know how it is. You got gang homicides." He shook his head sadly. "Most of the time you're not going to be able to do much. Hell. When they keep it in the family you tend to just go with the flow. The paper's headlines or the position of the Ten O'clock News'11 pretty much dictate how many man hours we have to waste on looking into something like that." Eichord nodded. "I mean, you got a pro job, well .... "He shrugged and the thought trailed off into space.

"But you got guys going for a whack-out in Laclede Landing, Jesus. It's a helluva mess."

"All these firebombings," Eichord said. "These all related?"

"Yep. Here's what you got." He got up and uncovered a standup easel with a family-tree genealogy plotted out on it. "St. Louis family is really several different factions. You got your basic made wise guys, the old LCN, which was under the legendary Tony Gee, who I know you've heard about. He was the fucking man. He ran the whole schmear. His main man was another Tony, Tony Cypriot, and that's where they got the old name the papers used to use: the Two Tonys Mob. But it wasn't that at all. Gee ran everything for Chicago. This is back when I guess" — he glanced at some papers —"you were living here, if I remember my notes correctly."

"I was here in sixty-two and sixty-three," he said. He was looking into the lieutenant's eyes as he spoke and Jack doubted if there were too many notes Springer would remember incorrectly.

"Well, Tony Gee pulled the pin in the seventies. And what he left was Sally Dago — Salvatore Dagatina — who's still alive, by the way, and in the can. And a half-assed dope empire. The old-line Italian and Sicilian factions that had one time controlled all the gambling and narcotics and prostitution, which were under the splinter groups of Syrian, and Chink, and Latin wise guys — and the bikers — now these guys are getting long in the tooth too.

And they can't control the ethnic groups 'n' that. So you got the whole thing breaking into factions.

"Now you got your two Tonys gone. one dead, one kicked upstairs — Cypriot a big shot sitting on the national council, and Sally Dago takes a fall and goes in the slams. So all the people capable of running anything are out of pocket. Gee dead. Cypriot gone. Dago behind bars.

"See . . . Tony Gee was the last peacekeeper. He was like a, uh, orchestra leader, ya know? He pulled tile whole thing together. And with the other Tony and Sally out of the game there was nobody left with the brains, balls, and experience to keep the family unified. No godfather, like the papers are always saying. No safety valve for the territorial disputes and the faction arguments. No more clearinghouse. If you had the balls to make a move, you made a move. Never mind whose country you were in. Forget that turf shit — you went for it. So you had a mess.

"Tony Gee's lifelong confidant and counselor, Paul Rikla, and his bodyguard, James Measure, who had always hated each other's guts but coexisted out of necessity, had been elevated to underbosses with Sally Dago. Now Sally goes and you got these two Syrian dudes each running a faction of the family. The classic power struggle."

"These guys — Measure and Rikla — they're the two heads of the family now?" Jack asked. All the names were beginning to swirl. He'd just learned a whole set of California names. Now here comes another set.

"Right." Springer nodded.

"Where's Cypriot all this time? How come he's not back here taking over?"

"Aw, this is nothing. St. Louis is nickles and dimes to the big boys. Organized crime here isn't shit, and I'm not saying this to, you know, go, Oh, what a clean town we run. I just mean it isn't a big-crime town, as I'm sure you're aware. Kansas City has a little action but there isn't that much here. You got a couple things in East St. Louis, couple things north of town and whatnot, but it's small potatoes. Cypriot's on the national council. He's working in the Big Five New York families, working with the Chicago and Vegas and Miami people. He's a high roller now. St. Louis is like East Dipshit, Nowhere, to the big boys."

"Okay." Eichord couldn't seem to get his mind to kick into gear. His mouth had that familiar cottony taste that neither toothpaste nor mouthwash could stay from its appointed rounds.

"So you got die old-time consigliere, Rikla, and the bodyguard, Measure, running the family. Okay, now Rikla and Measure are both in their seventies. Oldtime warlords. Rikla's enforcer, Jimmie the Hook, Jimmy Russo, he gets killed in a car bombing. So Rikla, he firebombs Lyle Venable, who was the underboss for Measure — and you got a very volatile situation."

"So it's a purely gang-related thing, you think."

"Umm." The lieutenant's face collapsed a little.

"That's hard to say at this point. Some of the kills are so . . . random. They don't seem to fit the pattern of payback or vengeance hits but it's hard to nail it down. Like this Laclede Landing thing" — he shook his head and rubbed hard at his eyes as if he'd walked into cobwebs —"it just isn't the way you do things. You don't draw that kind of attention, that kind of heat. You don't let something get out of control like that."

The first briefing finally got interrupted by the pressures of the day's activities, and Springer passed Jack along to other hands. Eichord spent the rest of the day trying to absorb the odd structure of the Special Division, a subunit within the dozen main circles of responsibility. This was the central cog of a wheel with spokes that disected the city jurisdictionally, and it was typically complex, labyrinthine, and geographically (not to mention philosophically) puzzling to him.

As always he felt his way along carefully, shutting nothing out, the sensors purring quietly; listening, watching, feeling as much as understanding. Tactile, impassive, questioning softly, absorbent, nonjudgmental, open to possibilities. Learning, sensing, spongelike.

The cops in SD looked like teachers for sure. At least more State than street copper. No narky-looking dudes. No gold chains. Businessmen or schoolteachers in their short sleeves and ties. No gunfighter mustaches. No long hair. No fat guys. Lean and clean. State roddish. Feds maybe. Very unstreet.

Loose, but not giving him much. All business. Welcome to St. Louis. Nice meeting you. Here's your desk. This is a telephone. Here's how you get outside. This is how you dial on the Intercom system. Here's a directory. This is a map. Very rank conscious. Cool smiles and paperwork. Guys who wanted good paychecks for their good policework. Young career cops on the make.

Eichord wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but whatever it was, this wasn't quite it. The last place he'd done any temporary duty they'd been worse flakes than the maniacs who were his beloved brethren at Buckhead. Sort of an orderly lunatic asylum. Before that he'd been working out of a metro force so corruption-ridden that it had acquired a national rep. The force was generally conceded to be one of the big three centers for crooked cops on the take. It was a thing that went back sixty, seventy years, back through two and three generations of cop families sometimes — an organic part of The Job. It was so bad there that straight cops could hardly function within the "pad."

The pad went all the way to the top, dizzying heights if you were street heat feeding the maw of a machine that reached far beyond the PC and the mayor and right into the black bag that got passed around the state house every week. When a pad is that thick, with tentacles that far-reaching, going right through the judges and prosecutors and county officials and into the legislator's pockets — then you can forget about it.

It was part of a way of life. The pad went way beyond being on the arm for the odd goody-gumdrop. This was going on die take as a CAREER DIRECTION and there were those who went for it the same way street-smart old-timers angled for a certain beat before Knapp hit the NYPD. Eichord knew his share of cops who saw the street as a free lunch for the entrepreneur with savvy. He didn't share their rationale about the payola perquisites, but he'd managed the minor miracle of staying relatively straight in one of the two or three most corruption-ridden shops in the country, without earning any of the pejorative nicknames like Mr. Clean or St. Eichord that would stick to you and haunt your career.

Vic Springer had been cordial in a cold kind of way, but Jack had a solid first impression of the man and he liked him. That was vital. At least that the ostensible cat in charge be somebody who wouldn't bury Eichord in bullshit. He thought Springer looked like a good, hard-nosed straight shooter. A good cop.

What Springer looked like was in fact a caricature of a hound dog. A plug-ugly version of Lyndon Johnson. A sad-eyed basset but photographed by Karsh. A woebegone hound who had one of those faces that wore a perpetual expression of dolorousness. Eichord would soon learn that this was his happy face. In normal repose his countenance registered abject misery. When he was upset, angry, or dejected, his face caved in like a wrecked building. But Eichord knew that faces are only masks.

Jack shook the necessary hands and left to seek appropriate lodging. On the minus side, the cop shop looked like it could be a problem. He'd put on his best PR hat and try to shake it out. The killings seemed so unrelated and, for want of a better word, random he hadn't even begun to comprehend it all. A tough case for Mr. Keen, and impossible for Mr. Eichord. Where the hell was the Falcon when you needed him?

Also on the minus side, he didn't remember a damn thing about the St. Louis of today. Where had Gaslight Square gone to when he wasn't looking? Where would he go to drink his single light beer as he sat at a friendly sidewalk cafe talking with amiable strangers? How would Mr. Crime Crusher find his way around town? What was he doing here? Why me, Lord? he thought.

On the plus side .... he liked the arch.

Forewarned about the St. Louis apartment scene, he'd headed for a motel that advertised you could SLEEP CHEAP under their hospitable roof, and the room smelled like a chemical pine forest where the trees smoked, but the bed looked good. He didn't. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he was hanging up his clothing, trying to see what kind of canine he resembled, and he finally decided a street mongrel. The dark-eyed pound hound glared back in silent reproof.

It had been weeks since Spain had woken bathed in nightmare sweat. The killings in Texas and Florida and across the border had left him serene and calm. He'd been sleeping like a baby of late, sleeping the kind of sleep you get from hard work, good health, peace of mind, and an untroubled conscience. But this time something had been off-key. He'd worked a bit too hard. Gone to bed exhausted. Vulnerable.

He'd fallen asleep fully clothed, bone-weary, and for the first time in many nights a bad dream came and got him again. It was the worst one of all. It began in absolute black with him dreaming he was dreaming, listening to his own loud snores, then seeing something moving in the corner of the darkened bedroom and jerking awake in fear. Did he forget to throw the bolts he'd just installed on the doors? Had someone entered the house while he was sleeping?

A horrible, undefined presence fills him with fear. It moves again. Just a suggestion of an outline moving there in the deep blackness, and he almost screams at the eyes that blink open. Huge yellow eyes glowing brightly as a cat's eyes will appear to reflect light in darkness, but these are electric yellow, piercingly bright, a couple of feet apart. Whatever this thing is, it is huge.

In his heart he knows what has come to get him. This dark, millenarian force that sleeps the sleep of death. Spain's mind feeds him a word he does not know: chilead. He shivers. This evil thing he sees has chosen to wake up in the midst of Spain's dream. And although he cannot see in the darkness he knows its mighty razor claws are clutching a single, amaranthine fleur du mal. He can imagine its reptilian dragon skin, this ultraxerothermic thing that thrives on blast furnace heat, and he knows of the dread monster's power. And he is so afraid that before he can catch himself the scream escapes.

The monstrous thing roars to life in an explosion of wind rain light fiber optics rainbows oil slicks fire ice fog hurricane typhoon monsoon tornado tidal wave blizzard intense heat invisible cobwebs catching in the hair and eyelashes a sense of foreign substances being injected down through subdermal layers as the thing's feeders extend out like shoots of lightning stabbing him with surgical precision in his orifices like blinding catheters of death and ... He shudders with the first deft feeding touch that drains his lifeblood in a violent, spasmodic suck. The thing opens its reptile jaws and articulates, "Well, hello dere." And it laughs raucously as he feels the thing begin shooting the alien microorganisms back down through the catheters, filling him up with the foul scavengers' anal drippings taken from the bottom of the deepest trench of the blackest vomitorium of hell, fucking him with the devil's sperm scorching him as the thing forces it back down inside him.

The enormous thing moves closer and Spain can see that it is encased in a gelatinous membrane that houses its food and waste sacs. The reptile's skin is pale, dead-looking like a freshly powdered corpse, stretched tightly across a misshapen skull, but brightly colored, with unnatural highlights that suggest an opalescent mutation. Eyes are the color of pus afire.

The long silver tongue appears sanguine, as if a large, garlike fish had been dipped in coagulating blood, and it is forked, barbed, ridged, and extensile, still coated with a recent regurgitation.

Bright wet red on rubidium silver that inflames when the air hits it as the thing articulates, "Come on now, give us a big kiss," and roars again in a massive paroxysm of uncontrollable hilarity and vomits up his blood. Spain is drenched in a boiling hot shower of exudate, leukocytes, offal, bloody tissue, and feces. And he wakes up dreaming he is drowning in a Niagara of scalding filth hearing the ancient monster's laughter in the distance, muffled as if underwater as Spain dies hearing the thing's voice say faintly, "You kill me," as he is drained, burnt, shocked, drowned, suffocated, asphyxiated, exsanguint-ed, and frightened — to death.

And Spain dreams he dies, transfused through vascular nasties by Demogorgon's putrid, poisonous, scorching, deadly coital ejaculate, and boiled in killer fuck.

Eichord was no big whodunit sleuth. Not in his mind. No white knight or blue crime crusher. He saw himself as no better or worse than most of the co-workers. The attitude made for good vibes. So Jack would get along with even the worst and the stupidest and the most corrupt among them if the case demanded it. He was totally into getting The Job done. And he loved the action of Homicide.

MCTF, originally funded to handle unusual major crimes of violence, had been restructured shortly after the Doctor Demented thing, and Eichord found him-self playing a new role — that of a key agent with an elite special unit.

McTuff was more than just another tax-dollared, tunnel vision committee-run hand job. It was federally funded, to be sure, but there similarities ended.

When an agency, local or otherwise, plugged into MCTF it accessed a vast network offering some of the richest data product ever provided law enforcement. COMSEC at Ft. Meade, the counterterrorism think tanks here and in Europe, the Academy at Quantico, DEA, the military, you had it all a fingertip away.

You could cross-reference crime-scene reports on a possible serial killing in Mississippi or plumb the incredible resources of some of NCIC's best-kept secrets, all in the push-button miracle of high tech.

For the last few years the paralyzing rivalries that had torn through certain areas of law enforcement had begun to disintegrate. A new director had revamped the FBI to the point where it was now dealing with both the locals and the gents in Langley, and there was some actual sharing of important collars, as well as information and evidence. It was truly without precedent, codifying computerized group-think and launching the new, emergent criminologist, which boded ill for criminals. The new spirit of liaison was especially important in narcotics-related cases, but it also meant that certain types of homicides had a much better chance of being cleared.

McTuff produced crime-profile printouts that reflected an unbelievable degree of sophistication. It structured threat-assessment work-ups that had enormously beneficial capability on many levels. And best of all to police, it was user-friendly. Jack was a believer. He thought that the Task Force's greatest strength was its subtle, implicit reliance on the human being. It seemed to understand there was only one way to really find out what somebody else was thinking or what they were going to do — and to find that out, you had to use people. Other cops. Informants. This was the area where McTuff worked its most fertile and productive soil. It could build you a snitch machine.

Life is a series of trade-offs. The art of compromise. The understanding of quid pro quo. One hand washing another. And in the strange, murky, quirky world of law and the lawbreaker, justice demanded the oily, slippery lubricant of the deal to continue functioning. If you accepted this you would make the system work for you. If you didn't your life on The Job could be a nightmare.

The complexities of the maddening legal system itself could hamstring a law officer to the point of paralysis. The jurisdictional intricacies, the opaqueness of the codes, the double-think of the statutes, the sheer insanity of the procedures, rules, postulates, and disciplines, could nail you through your shield; leave you rigid, desk-bound, static, immobilized by the bone-crushing weight of the paperwork, skewered by the uncompromisingly doctrinaire methodology of the frustratingly inadequate system that had failed the society it promised to protect and serve.

MCTF had been devised, implemented, programmed, and calibrated by people who had worked their whole lives within the system and they had used their hard-won knowledge. The computer knew how to search for potential information keys, and it gave a user the proper leverage with which to put a machine into motion. A lowly copper in Buchanan County-miles, histories, quantum leaps away from a powerful DA in Suffolk County, just as one example — could patch right into a heavyweight plea-bargain deal that would accomplish what only the best negotiators could pull off: make all the parties happy simultaneously. McTuff knew how to make a jam disappear, and crime is solved by snitches, never doubt it. It was the ultimate snitch machine.

The Task Force had no centuries-old tradition of policework as a heritage. Fathered by high tech, its mother of invention had been the bestial serial murders that had seemed to spring out of the poisonous karma of the 60s, like some mutation from Agent Orange. Zodiac, Manson, Gacey, a blood-soaked trail of bodies sweeping across the country, leaving a wake of grisly legend.

The Task Force, obviously, was a child of the times. So Jack Eichord, people-oriented copper, had become Jack Eichord, task-oriented organization man. These were not your run-of-the-mill bad guys, these serial kills. They were a new breed of evil mutant and they had to be found and stopped — at any cost.

It was to McTuff that Eichord turned first, with a fat dossier full of fact and conjecture and a dozen thankless tasks that could not be accomplished by computers and think tanks alone. PEOPLE would have to go interrogate all those TWA flight attendants and stewardii and gift-shop employees. Somebody had to ask all those questions and hear all those answers, and as always — in the end — it all came down to shoe leather.

And Big Mac failed him this time. SEE NO EVIL had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.

The one called Spain sat perusing his St. Louis dossier, now more of a scrapbook actually, and his gaze fell upon a small two-column clipping razored out of a recent Post-Dispatch. Its headlines read MISSOURI APPEALS COURT REVERSES CONVICTION, and he saw the name Andrew Dudzik and something clicked in place in his mind. He remembered the connection now and he scanned the article again.

The Missouri Court of Appeals at St. Louis has reversed the conviction of a St. Louis man on a charge of dealing in narcotics and controlled substances. Andrew Dudzik, 28, of the 800 block of Bancroft Avenue, was accused of selling heroin and various stolen pharmaceuticals to an undercover officer posing as a Cairo, Illinois, drug dealer, according to Lawrence V. Goetz, assistant St. Louis circuit court attorney.

Goetz identified the accused man as Andrew "Candy" Dudzik, owner of American Industrial Laundry, Inc., of Washington Park, and St. Louis organized-crime figure, with alleged ties to the Dagatina crime family, which authorities believe controls the narcotics and child-pornography rackets in St. Louis.

The Appeals Court ruled Tuesday that the crime had occurred in the state of Illinois, not Missouri, and writing for the court Presiding Judge Richard B. Brewer said he "regretted that such a conviction must be reversed, particularly in light of the complex interstate transactions of our present day." But that "any change from existing law must be addressed by our legislature."

"A written accusation submitted in the case was defective, it was also learned, because it failed to charge all of the elements of the crime," Goetz added.

Noted criminal defense attorney Jacob Rozitsky, Jr., denied that the ruling was "unduly restrictive" and "highly suspect," in the words of an unidentified source in the circuit attorney's office. "This reversal of an unjust conviction showed great fairness and courage by the court," Rozitsky said.

Concurring with Presiding Judge Brewer were judges Quentin R. Ide and James DeMournier.

He closed the scrapbook and underlined the name Dudzik, Andrew, on a loose sheet of yellow, lined paper and then added the names Rozitsky, Jacob, Junior, and Brewer, Richard B., printing in tiny, meticulously precise letters.

He opened the St. Louis telephone directory and searched through the Brewers until he found a Brewer, Richard B., and he made a note of both the office and home addresses by the side of the name Dudzik, next to his address at 827 Bancroft Avenue, connecting the two listings with a tiny double-pointed arrow.

He started to draw a tiny question mark beside the Brewer entry, but then he pursed his lips in thought for a moment and said softly, "Fuck it." And then he began to laugh.

Everything was working beautifully. He grinned with delight each time media headlined another mob-war story. He'd touched it all off himself with the two firebombings. The rest of it had been the two sides retaliating for imagined assaults by the opposition. He loved it. Perfect justice. The laugh dies. His face tightens again into a frown of hatred. Candy Dudzik. Candy fucking Dudzik wasn't even a maggot crawling on a piece of shit. And he could buy protection and claim to be tied to the Dagatina crime family. That was the precise reason even a greaseball like Gaetano Ciprioni had sense enough not to fool with scum like Jimmie the Hook and Blue Kriegal. Jesus. What had the family come down to? He couldn't believe it. He thought about the scum and what he was going to do when he took the big ones down — how he'd make their suffering long and hard. But it was making him sick to think about them, and he couldn't get the images of Tiff out of his mind and finally he forced himself to think of something else.

He looked back on the mob the way it had been when he had been elevated along with Ciprioni to the level of the top enforcer for the national organization. These so-called mob leaders had been the lowest rungs of the ladder back then. This Rikla and this Measure were nothing. He remembered

Measure, who he figured had to be seventy-four now if he was a day. Nothing but some muscle who'd had his eyes on die twat industry. His big deal was he came to the family twenty-five years back and they'd brought him in as a bodyguard. Then later they gave him a heavy sports book for his initial livelihood. But he was nothing but a glorified button man.

He'd been given some massage parlors, outcall houses, a couple of the sex shops, and an X-house — the porn thing. He'd brought William "Blue" Kriegal in from Detroit to help him put it all together. A couple of ancient faggots. He'd whack them out in the most painful ways he could invent — and this fucking Rikla was the original town pervert. All garbage. He'd make them suffer the way Tiff had.

He found the Brewer address that evening. Clayton. Medium swank. Semishabby but huge home that stunk of old money. A woman in the yard watering something. He pulled on past the house and down the block, up a back alley. Dogs barking everyfuckingwhere as he slowly cruised the alley, parking behind the Brewer home. He got out purposefully and walked up to the back-door steps and knocked on the door. In about twenty seconds a man answered the door, not opening it but saying "Yes?" through the screen.

"Hi," Spain said with a big smile. "Man, I'm sorry to trouble you folks but I need to get at a phone for just one second. I'm Ron Ryan with KMOX, and I've got to call in a traffic accident." He gestured down toward the nearest main thoroughfare. "It's a local call, but I'm not in the unit and they need to get some cops and an ambulance out there." His face taking on a serious, worried, responsible mask now, the heavy-lidded eyes open as wide as he could get them.

"All right," the older man says with an irritated sigh that he didn't try to conceal, "if you won't be long."

"Oh," Spain says, "that's so good of you folks. I sure do appreciate it."

The man points at the phone and Spain nods and picks up the receiver and begins dialing. The older man may or may not be Brewer. The house is nicely furnished but not opulent. Could be a judge's home. "Hello? This is Ryan. Could I have the newsroom please? Thanks." He covers the phone like there's someone on the other end. "You're not Judge Brewer, are you?" Friendly smile. The man nods and smiles slightly. "I THOUGHT I recognized you." And he lays the phone down as the .25 comes out of his pocket. "You be a good boy now, and Mrs. Brewer won't be bothered. You don't want her hurt, do you?"

The judge shakes his head.

"I just want you to come with me to talk with some people. If you cause a commotion I'll just whack you out and come back here and waste Mrs. B. You don't want that. So don't give me trouble. The vehicle is in the alley out back. When you walk straight out the back, if your wife sees you just smile and tell her you'll be back in a couple of minutes. If she asks you where you're going, just say you'll explain to her when you come back, you want to see something this man has. Just mumble something vague and get in. Don't stop or say anything suspicious to her. understand?"

"Yes."

"Move." Spain motions with the gun. "Don't do anything dumb." He notices all the paintings. "Tell her somebody has a watercolor for sale or something. Be convincing unless you want to get shot."

They get in the car, which Spain starts, and when he sees no one is watching them he tells the judge to put his head down. As he starts to bend down Spain clips him lightly with the gun and the man crumples forward as they drive off. They are still driving as the man makes a groaning noise and Spain tells him, "Stay down. Just keep your mouth shut."

"If I'm harmed I want to warn you of the severe —"

Spain kicks him in the teeth and he begins crying. "Shut the fuck up," he hisses.

Soon they pull up in front of a huge cornfield. Spain turns off onto a gravel road, then turns again into a path made by a tractor where mud ruts have solidified to the consistency of cement. The narrow path is between the outer row of stalks and a thick and massive hedgerow beside the road. They stop.

"Get out." The man obeys. He is a pleasant-looking man in his late fifties to mid-sixties. One of those faces you can't peg. Deeply creased face. Portly, but only fat in the belly. So probably went to fat late in life. Dark tan. A golfer or a yardwork fanatic. Expensive diamond ring. Gold watch. Good shoes. He sees all this in the half-second or so it takes to register an opinion. Sizing up people is part of the worker's trade.

"Stand there," Spain says. Getting out. They walk in between two of the huge rows. The corn is as high as an elephant's eye, or something. Spain pulls out a small awl. Awl or nothing at awl, he thinks. This is what he likes.

"Listen to me with the greatest concentration. If you lie to me. If you whine. If you claim you didn't take any money. I will hurt you. I only want to know this. How much were you paid to reverse the Candy Dudzik conviction and who paid you?"

"I don't have a clue as to what you . . . AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-HHHHHHH," he screams into the row of corn that towers over them. "Ohhhhhhhh. Please. I didn't take any money. Honestly. Please don't hurt —"

"SHUTTUP, YOU FUCK!"

"OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, JESuS, DON'T," he cries again.

"How much? And take your time — we have hours."

"Two thousand dollars."

"Who gave you the money?"

"A lawyer." He's whimpering like a little child.

"WHAT lawyer, asshole?"

"Rozitsky."

Spain stabs down into the man's shoulder, down through shirt, skin, tendons, dignity.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-HHHHHHH!"

"You've got a point," Spain tells him, in a good mood as he thrusts the needle-pointed awl into the man's ear. "YOU PIECE OF TRASH! He thrusts the awl in again and again. When there is no sound or movement he pulls the man by his ankles, pulling the body out of the corn and toward the trunk of the vehicle. "You fat shit," he mutters.

The judge is deceptively heavy. His face is dotted like a cartoon of someone with measles.

A bird soars over them, diving down between the rows of corn, making a noise that sounds to Spain like "Kill-deer, kill-deer."

"Fucking right," Frank Spain says aloud. Still in a very good mood as the trunk opens. "Here come de judge," he says.

Eichord's second day in town he met a vision. A vision that squeezed his heart with both hands until he begged for mercy. A vision that knocked on his forehead with a small, finely boned hand and whispered, "Anybody home in there?" A vision of the most eye-ball-popping, totally captivating beauty and prodigious sex appeal he'd seen in, oh, several days at least.

The problem is Eichord was at the point that many single, busy men sometimes reach in midlife,- they begin to suffer from the old and feared exotic disorder Lack-a-nookie, and so you must understand that a vision squeezed his heart with both hands until he begged for mercy once, maybe twice a day. But this vision was different. This was one Gang Busters of a lady named Rita Haubrich.

He hadn't scheduled himself to talk to anybody for a couple of days. The plan had been to start wading through the mountain of paperwork but he just couldn't get into it. The smallest thing, finding the drawer where such and such a folder was kept, presented a major challenge to his disoriented mind that morning. The strangeness of the city had bothered him since he hit town, and he decided to bite right into that first, so he went to talk to the two people who'd been hurt in the Laclede Landing gunplay. The two civilians.

The survivors, so to speak, were a couple of innocent passersby walking in opposite directions, a man and woman. The man on the outside of the sidewalk, a carpet salesman named Sorga, had taken a .38 slug in his left wrist, the impact flying him into the Haubrich woman, whom fate had placed next to him. She had taken a severe injury to her neck when she was smashed up against a stone wall. Neither had claimed to have seen much, but one never knew. He'd hike over the told trail again.

He intended to catch Sorga, then go by the towing business that was Paul Rikla's semilegit front, on his way back from University City, where the carpet guy was recuperating at home. On the map at least it was more or less on his way to Forest Park. He'd have to talk with Measure and Rikla sooner or later, although the odds of him getting anything were not worth considering. The morning was a disaster.

He spent the whole morning spinning his wheels. Mr. Sorga was a grumpy, reticent, ill-humored character who spent forty-five minutes jerking Eichord's chain about one thing or another, mostly the fact that you couldn't go about your business anymore because the police were too busy writing traffic tickets to blah blah and on and on. After this had gone on awhile he started wishing Sorga was one of those taciturn types with a natural disinclination to gab with strangers. In his case he was only reluctant to give Eichord any useful information about the shooting. He hadn't seen anything, anyone, anytime. It all happened too fast. And so on.

It looked like six streets over and down the block on a little gas-station map, but Rikla's Towing Service was a world of traffic away and Eichord nearly got accordioned in his borrowed wheels between a plateless truck and a tail-gating maniac. St. Louis traffic was ridiculous. It looked like the San Diego Freeway at ten-thirty in the morning. The slowest traffic seemed to be the middle lane, with the faster vehicles passing on both sides. He made it to the Rikla operation and was told Rikla was out. Where? Don't know. Any idea when he'd be back? Nope. He left a "special agent" card with his temporary phone number and extension inked in, asked Mr. Rikla to give him a call. Wonderful.

It was amazing when you'd lived in a town so many years back and you thought you'd forgotten all the names. But you get out there trying to find your way around in the drive-time kamikaze traffic and the names and locales start flooding back over your memory. The older you are, the more cities you've lived in, the more it all blends together into a kind of Great American Vista of Gravois and Grady and Natural Bridge and Northwest Parkway and Kings Highway and Turtle Creek. He was beginning to get some of it back now, the memories of Florissant and . . . DAMN! Look where you're going, you idiot. He hadn't seen traffic like this since he left Orange County.

The day was already half over and he hadn't had lunch yet. He hated everything about this case. The people at headquarters were cold and suspicious, he didn't think he liked St. Louis anymore, the traffic was abominable, he was getting a killer headache, it looked like it might rain, he hadn't a notion what he was doing here, and to paraphrase the late Mr. Lewis, "This was as good as he was going to feel the rest of the day."

It wasn't the times he'd got into the dark, salty-smelling bars to chat with the guys over a Strohs or Oly Light that tested him. He could easily sip one or two cold ones and catch just enough of the buzz to enjoy himself and not feel like he was deprived of all the fun in life, go home, have a nice cup of instant or a cup of tea, and call it a night. He did it all the time-had for years. There was no demon there at all. Or so he always hoped.

Long ago he'd made himself drink a beer against his better judgment. Like a normal person. He had business in bars. The Job took him where booze was. He had to handle it. There was never a problem. A couple, even three beers led him nowhere. The John maybe. That was it.

It was the hard stuff that beckoned with that middle finger. Times like now, when he was bouncing around in same strange burg and not able to find his kiester with both hands, a nice headache coming to get him, dreading going into work every morning, going out and accomplishing nothing, coming in and accomplishing less, feeling around on the outsides of a seamless, complex case, no input, no information network, nothing but his cop sense and luck to work for him, times like now — he could taste it a little.

The fear of it kept him from falling off. He could never get used to the ease with which it could sneak up on him. Eleven-forty A.M. and driving into Forest Park. How easy it would be right now to hang a left there, pull up beside that little ma-and-pa tavern, and be raising a triple before you could say, Katie, bar the door. He was always that close to going over the edge, so when he sensed it creeping up on him he'd block it out. Fear works, he thought. At least so far.

Later, when he thought about it, he could never remember much about the first time they met again. The whole day receded into a nice blur. He'd gone into the Acquisitions Office with temples pounding and a fairly colossal-looking receptionist smiled a hello and raised her eye brows and he'd asked for Rita Haubrich and did the lady happen to have any aspirin?

And she said, when he told her his name, "Don't you I'm-Jack-Eichord me." With that look and smile and tone people get when they want you to know you should recognize them.

"My goodness," he said, looking again. "Is it Rita Paul? From a million years ago?"

"You remembered." She smiled a sunny smile. "And it's Rita Paul Haubrich now, and that's a hundred years ago, please. Let's not make it any worse than it is. You look just the same." He was starting to tell her how great SHE looked, but she said, "And I've got some Tylenols right here if that will do? Let's see ..." She began to rummage and he spoke while he looked at her.

"Rita. What a nice surprise. I just never expected to see you here."

"I'm not the receptionist. I usually work back there," she said, gesturing vaguely toward another area, "but Terry had to take her child to the doctor so I'm filling in. When you called I started to say something but it took a minute to sink in that it was you. I've had so many of the local police and reporters talk to me that . . . And what are you doing back in St. Louis anyway?"

"I'm working on some gang homicides."

"I saw your name in the papers once. Some investigation where you were in the headlines, and I wasn't surprised. I knew you were going to be famous. You were so dedicated."

"Remember the DA's office?" They both laughed. "That was a fun place," he said, and she sneered and puckered her lovely mouth.

"Yeah. Real fun. I got out of there not long after you left St. Louis."

"You married the big lawyer. That guy you were dating when we knew each other, Haubrich."

"Yep," she admitted. "Good memory."

"His name's something like Don?"

"Winslow. Winslow Haubrich."

"God. That's right. Winslow. Good ole Winslow," he said without conviction. "How is old Winslow?"

"I haven't seen old Winslow for a while, I'm pleased to report. We're divorced."

"Oh. Sorry," he said with even less conviction.

"You still married?"

"Not for a long time," he said, shaking his head. "Well," he sighed, having to force his mind back on the case at hand, "this is great to see you. What a nice surprise." He meant it.

"It's nice to see you too. You really haven't changed a bit." She smiled and he loved it.

"You either." He thought she was a lot better-looking since the last time he'd seen her — but that was years ago. Maybe he hadn't been quite as horny back then. He would never have recognized her in a crowd and he realized immediately it was her hairdo and clothing and not her face. She'd aged beautifully. "Excuse me — just a second." He walked across to a water fountain.

"Sure." He took the Tylenol and walked back to the desk.

"We might get interrupted," she told him, "but we can go ahead and talk if you want to."

"Sure, okay. Let me just get my notes here. What can you tell me about the Laclede Landing shooting? "

"It's just like I said to the other guys, which I know you have in your files and all. I wish I could help but I really didn't get more than just a glance at them. It all happened so quickly. I heard the noise and the man hit me almost at the same time. I just saw a car. It was a car with either two or three men in it. I know I saw a gun out the right-side window in the front seat and I just have an impression of a — a shotgun, I think it was — and I can't be sure if somebody was in the backseat or not. It was all so fast."

"You got a look at the car?"

"Not really. I just have that impression. Of a gun out of a window and the firing. I couldn't even say it was a dark color car for sure. I just . . . Well, the shots hit that man and he hit me as he fell and I went into the wall and it was all over in just a second. I was getting up, trying to get up. It was kind of like if you had real bad whiplash in a car accident or something. I heard all the screaming and there was a lot of blood. I saw the men who had been shot then. And people were all crouched down and it was so frightening — I don't know —"

"That's fine. I just thought perhaps we could talk. Sometimes if you think back you can remember some little detail you might have overlooked. The appearance of the man with the gun, for example. You don't remember anything about his face?"

"I couldn't tell you if he had a beard, what nationality, nothing. I just didn't retain anything about him. Just that short shotgun sticking out the window as he fired again and how loud it was. It was enough to scare you to death. I'd never been through anything like it in my life."

"You said shotgun the first time, then short shotgun. What kind of a short shotgun? What do you mean?"

"Oh, like you see in the movies. Sawed off, I guess. It was a short gun. Not a pistol. It had one barrel, not two like some of my dad's guns. I remember this gun, oh, I do recall seeing a hand move on the gun like it was cocking it or whatever you call it. That's when I got hit, as the second shot was fired and the man got hit next to me on the sidewalk."

"Rita, I noticed in the reports you had a severe injury. Obviously you seem to be fine now." So fine, in fact.

"Yes." She smiled. "I was pretty lucky. It was weird. I thought for a day or two I was going to be in some trouble. The doctor was talking about the possibility of surgery on a disc, and I was getting kind of worried. It was very painful, like a pinched-nerve thing back here." She gestured toward the back of her neck, a move that rearranged her clothing in a most attractive way, and Eichord fought to look impassive and official as she continued telling him about X rays, and how it was better the next day, and how she was okay now.

She was warm, outgoing, genuine, sunny, affectionate-appearing, and yes, very sexy. And she was someone pleasant in a day of unpleasantness and he just stood there drinking her in. God. Rita Paul. Who'd a-thunk it. Her cheerfulness and warmth, and yes, her sexiness chipped away at his official reserve. She finally broke his icy police professionalism down but it hadn't been easy.

It had taken her a good twenty or thirty seconds of conversation. He felt like silly putty.

It wasn't only the fact that she was dynamite-looking. It was also the fact that the day was half over and he hadn't had lunch. It was the fact that this was as good as he was going to feel the rest of the day. And, too, let's be fair. It was the fact that she was DYNAMITE-LOOKING! All right. Wow! Ummm. Yes. He could no more walk away from Rita than the man in the moon could turn into cheese.

"Let's get to the bottom of this," he said in his most Sherlockian tones, saying it just to be saying something funny, then as the words came out he winced at the hidden double entendre, and she laughed sweetly, and . . . oh, shucks. The rest of the day just faded into a hazy memory, when he looked back at it. The fact that he'd walked into the office of someone who was a witness to a crime scene and ended up asking her out for coffee was merely — oh, what would you call it? — a social courtesy. Public relations. Just being friendly. Let's have a cup and talk about it. That kind of thing. A good with-it police representative wants to have cordial relations with the public as much as he possibly can, right? And Jack DESPERATELY wanted to have relations with Rita Haubrich.

What's the matter with me? he remembered thinking to himself, knowing full well the answer as a timeless Hawaiian malady coursed through his veins. Looking back on the fuzzy day all he could really recollect was that he'd had a marvelous time with this colossal-looking lady from out of their mutual past and that it hadn't turned out to be such a bad day, after all.

By the time he ended up back at Twelfth and dark it was late midday and time to do serious policework. This is why there was a federally funded Task Force sitting there throbbing, humming, purring away with its network of interfaced computer linkages. This is why the most sophisticated forensic scientists and advanced criminologists in the world called McTuff the "greatest contemporary aid to law enforcement." This is why the combined brainpower of a great metropolitan law-enforcement agency would reach out for help. It all came down to one man. The finest detective of the century.

Genius is an abused word, he thought, but perhaps it does apply in this case. The genius crime crusher of all time. Thank GOD that these people had the wisdom and the courage to reach out for Jack Eichord to help them solve these puzzling homicides.

Here is what they got that afternoon for their money. Okay, first off — unless you really have a comprehensive understanding of vector analysis, the calculus of complex mechanistic variables, the ellipsoidal harmonics of heterogeneous configurations, hypergeometric functions and orthogonal para-nomials — in other words, just your basic genius stuff — this won't seem like much to you.

First, Jack drew an enormous letter A that filled a sheet of white paper with its symmetry, and with a felt-tipped pen made it look as if it had been carved from wood, complete with knot holes and dents and gouges, and then he gave it dimension and then he shadowed in the perspective.

Next — and this was the brilliant part — he carefully printed out the names of everyone he'd come in contact with today whose first or last named ended in a letter A. SorgA, Rikla he hadn't met but he'd thought a lot about so he printed RiklA, Rita he printed with an especially neat A: RitA, printing the names so they'd sit next to each other beside the giant A which would then be the last letter of their names, you see. This is his "Big A Doodle," which took up a good ten to fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, genius that he was, he was able to listen intently to the whispered conversation around him.

He learned that the Cards were three and oh on the season, Dr. Watson, and had dropped thirteen of their last fifteen games counting regular season play. That everybody on the Cardinal bench hates Dallas. That two detectives named T. J. Monahan and Pat Skully had either a friend or colleague named Art Castor who told disgustingly gross jokes. That it was going to rain tonight. That the tomatoes were all gone.

This so inspired Eichord that he took his felt-tipped pen and began an "Art Castor Doodle." He was pleased with the intricacy of it: an ornate series of interconnected squigglies that surrounded a twenty-word transposition of the name "Art Castor," and — here's the wonderful part — made contextual sense. The sentence that comprised the doodle read "Art Castor cast a rat to act as Castro," and "to cast Coast actors to co-star as Croats to roast Astro Astor." He felt a surge of unbridled excitement as it occurred to him he might add a phrase "to tar or rot a Tarot tart, to start to trot," which would add a dozen more words that could give him another fifteen minutes of doodling, when a voice behind him said. "I'm certainly glad we got McTuff's heavy hitter on this bitch. Now that I see the caliber of brilliant detective work we can expect," followed by maniacal laughter.

Eichord turned and a huge man towering behind him was laughing.

"Bud Leech, Intelligence." He laughed. "Gladaseeya."

"God, I hope so," Jack said, laughing with him. Two friendly faces in one day, it was almost too much luck for one afternoon. Leech was more like the cops Eichord was used to, and they went downstairs and had coffee, Eichord beginning to slosh when he walked, and talked some about the case and the peculiarities of the city.

Jack learned what it was. The unit had been burned recently in a citywide scandal involving the mob and two of the coppers who had been caught on the take. Everybody had figured him for a natural shoe-fly. They assumed the McTuff thing was a setup by the sneaky assholes in Internal Affairs Division.

And Bud Leech told him a lot more as the day wore on. He learned about how the mob had penetrated the highest levels of the force here, how their tentacles stretched out into the court system and into the senior strata of government. Facts to reaffirm Eichord's feeling that St. Louis was more than it appeared. He was beginning to at least see some of the pieces of the puzzle, but the problem was what names to ascribe to them.

Law-abiding or lawless, victims or victimizers, as always in what laughingly gets called real life, nothing much is pure black or white. Reality appears in shades. Degrees. And there was an added layer of complexity here. Eichord suspected they were dealing with something more than warring mob factions.

He played Las Vegas style. When you're cold, you fold; when you're hot, you shoot your shot. He phoned Rita Haubrich, getting her voice on the first ring, and wondered if she'd help a newcomer find his way around the town a little this weekend and he could remember later thinking about all the red hair and those long legs and that mouth and getting in the car and he's singing softly about how the pale moon didn't excite him and trying not to move his lips, thinking about this great-looking redhead when the first October raindrops started splashing down on his windshield.

In Spain's motel room he had a small box with the printed legend Greta Griswold. The box contained a man's brown hairpiece, a pair of ordinary rectangular-framed glasses with clear lenses, a pipe and pipe tobacco, and other small items that he used to pull a certain persona together. This was the persona who, under yet another alias, owned the fictitious company Direct Import Enterprises. And it was behind this mask and assumed character that Spain went whenever he had personal contact with one Greta Griswold, who was his cutout gofer, hence the name on the box.

Thanks to her efforts he'd be in the house soon. He was already working on plans for the Interrogation Room, which would add a necessary dimension of security to what he was about to do. The higher up in the organization his revenge took him, the greater the hazards would be to him personally, and this was one of the reasons for a safe, sanitized, soundproofed place where he could linger with his targets, take his time with them, take as long as he liked, where their screams would not draw unwanted attention. Where the blood could flow.

A woman named Greta Griswold was helping him in this regard. He'd hired her through his girl-friday ad. She was fifty-two. Plain. Timid. Obedient. Reasonably efficient. Not excessively bright or curious. He paid her just enough that she was grateful for the good wage, yet not enough she'd be suspicious. Spain did most of his business with her on the phone, but to avoid appearing too bizarre he had to have some contact with her. As it was, he had her convinced that he was simply a very busy, preoccupied, and eccentric employer who paid well and was willing to delegate a lot of unusual responsibility.

He put on his entrepreneurial hairpiece and glasses and pipe in place headed for their storefront office nearby. The disguise was not enough to fool anyone who knew him, but for someone who only saw him for a few minutes at a time, it might be enough to render him faceless in a police report. Glasses and a pipe and other certain mannerisms and affectations would be what she'd remember about the man himself.

"Good morning," he said, in a clenched voice that he used with her.

"Good morning, sir," she said, immediately starting in on the hundred things she'd saved up to tell him. "I've got your mail from the box there on the desk, and I cashed that check and put it in the deposit with your money from before, and this is the picture of the house," all over him with her little duties fulfilled, handing him a key, while he went, "Ummmm — fine."

"And this is for four-three-one. There's the Xerox of the multiple listings. You can't tell much from it but it has that, uh, unusual roofline and ceiling combination you said, uh, and you can take a look whenever you want. That's five-fifty a month. And this is how I entered that sale in the new ledger for accounts receivable ..." And as she went on with phony business, he tuned out, looking at the grainy picture of the house. He'd seen the rental property from the outside and it looked perfect. The lay of the land was an unexpected bonus.

He let her go on about fake-business stuff until she'd run out of things to tell him. She'd been "running his traps" for him. He had her take care of anything where there was personal contact with others, where a surveillance camera at the bank would retain an image of a depositor, where they'd retain a likeness of the individual who rented a postal drawer, anything like that. Rental properties seemed easier to negotiate than an outright purchase, so he'd had her deal extensively with the realtors. He would be a subject of much discussion there for his idiosyncratic way of having a secretary do his house bunting, but it wouldn't be the first time a busy executive delegated that to another party.

Once he got in the house he'd have no real reason for contact with either a real-estate agent or the home owner, as long as all his checks paid the rent well in advance. He would keep Greta busy with make-work, preparing mailings for his nonexistent business and responding to monies he would funnel into Direct Import Enterprises through another of his mail-drop covers. Keep her available for those unexpected times when a cutout was required.

"I'm going to go look at the house today. Nobody's in there doing repainting or anything, right?"

"No, sir. I was given to understand it would be empty."

"Okay. I'll let you know. I'll call and if I like it you can go ahead and wrap it up for me. Lock up here and just work on that, and when the house deal is settled you can go home early. All right?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you." She brightened at the idea of quitting early.

As he drove toward the home he let himself roar with laughter at the joy of what he'd already accomplished. Setting the mob factions against each other had been a beautiful touch, and accomplishing it, thanks to his assessment of the Troxell report and his own intimacy with the family's weaknesses, had been child's play. He relished the phrase. Child's play.

What made him laugh the hardest was the fact that he'd finessed those dumb shitbrains into whacking Lyle Venable for him. He had his eye on a target for each side that would really set this thing into motion. Blue Kriegal's long-time bodyguard, Johny Picciotti. And his counterpart within the other side of the family, another legbreaker named Tripotra. Their respective deaths, if handled right, would appear to be more gangland retaliation, if only to the cops and media.

He looked at the house and it was ideal. It had been made for his purposes. Both the isolation and the rooms themselves. He'd wanted "an unusual roofline with angles going every which way," he'd told Greta, even given her some sketches. "I like houses with unusual-shaped rooms, cathedral ceilings, sunken living rooms ..." And he'd gone on about his likes. But what he really wanted was a house where a secret room could be built and the walls wouldn't give it away.

Spain thought it was perfect. He stood there in the quiet house imagining what it would be like to hear the tortured screams of filth like Blue Kriegal and he laughed out loud. Most of all, to bring Ciprioni here . . . Oh, what a pleasure it would be to cut him open and slowly pull his guts out, make him watch as he was slowly, gently disemboweled and fed his own poisonous, shit-eating guts.

He went back to the motel and removed his Greta Griswold hairpiece and picked up the phone.

"Direct Import Enterprises," the woman said with enthusiasm, in one of her two or three contacts with the outside world each day.

"It's me," he told her unnecessarily. "I love it. It's nice. So go ahead and pay them the two months and get all the keys. Sign for me if you can."

"Okay. What if they have to have you come in and sign?"

"Explain to them I'm too busy. That I'm involved in a very delicate business deal with many meetings where I have to be available all the time — and just get anything that needs a signature and I'll sign it and have it returned to them." They hung up and Spain went out to the car and took a large sack of heavy items from the trunk.

He worked on hardware the rest of the day. By late afternoon he was parked down the street from the apartment house where Tripotra lived. He could see the man's fancy car in its parking stall. He'd be real tough to tail with a black Mercedes and the sophomoric vanity plates BADTRIP.

Spain felt his head falling to the side and he woke up. It was night. Shit. He'd dozed off. The Mercedes was still there. Forty-five minutes later and getting very uncomfortable, somebody comes out and gets into the black car. Spain follows him from a distance when he pulls out. Fifteen more minutes and he stops and talks to somebody Spain doesn't recognize. They get in their cars and he follows them out to the boonies.

The other car is a dark-colored Caddy, and it passes the Tripotra car, so Spain stays back with BADTRIP.

It was getting dark now and more difficult to tail. The lights of the traffic were starting to hurt Spain's eyes. He'd been in the car for hours and he was getting sore. His neck and back hurt and his butt was getting numb and he had a slight headache. He rolled down the window a bit and rubbed his eyes.

He had lost the black Mercedes momentarily with some idiot trucker darting in front of him, and then he saw it again and moved a little closer. He'd lost sight of the dark Caddy completely.

Suddenly they're both going up an off-ramp and Spain has no choice but to stay with them. It's a three-car convoy now. He can make the Caddy out. He's wide awake now and his mind is working very fast. Trying to figure what they'll do. If they stop at the top of the off-ramp, will they go left or right. Right. He has no choice. He'll have to go around them. No telling.

They don't stop, they keep moving to the right. Spain hangs in there.

The traffic up on the highway sung along in the nighttime symphony of semis and fast cars. The black Mercedes swung sharply around a curve and over a concrete-and-steel bridge, coming down off the blacktop a little too fast and fishtailing a little as it hit the gravel.

The driver braked behind a parked vehicle and killed the lights, getting out and looking up and down the road. He gets in the other car. Spain, who has been following the Mercedes, sees the man get into the parked car and he pulls over just on the other side of the curve. It looks deceptively close but he knows what it will be like trying to move through the wooded area there beside the highway; the grass looks fairly short but he has no idea what he'll be getting into. It's worth the effort, because if they'll stay in the parked car awhile it's a perfect grenade shot from the woods.

Even as he starts stomping through the high grass as he goes down the steep berm he thinks he might go back and just drive down past them, turn around as if he was lost, and pitch it in at them as he goes back. No, he decides, he'll use the tube and thump a round or two in on them with that. It's a perfect piece of terrain for the tube. He can turn right around, come back up the hill, get in his car, and he won't appear to have been anywhere near the other vehicles. The traffic and the insect noises are covering his sounds as he nears the edge of the trees.

Condensation from the driver's breath has formed a little frosty O on the inside of the windshield and he sits there listening to the other man talk, seemingly mesmerized by the spreading windshield fog from their hot breath.

"I gotta crank down the fucking window here," he says, and lowers his window, inhaling the night air with its wet redolence of tree fogs and crickets and mosquitoes. " Motherfucker stinks."

"Why doncha turn the goddamn motor back on and run your fuckin' air-conditioning, then."

"I could put the defrost on," the driver says, but he makes no move to do so.

"Yeah. You could do that. Then we wouldn't sit here be havin' the fucking mosquitoes eating on us and shit. Why doncha turn the fucker back on and get som'p'n goin' in here. Or just leave it alone and let the fucking thing fog up. One r'the other."

"Fucking weird time a' d' year, you freeze to death if you run the air-conditioning and you goddamn melt from the heat if you don't or —"

"Yeah, okay, well, look, I got to drive way the fuck out in the county yet tonight. Let's get it done, can we?"

"Hey, no shit, I ain't got all fucking night either. Do it." The man behind the wheel turns and with some effort lifts a heavy sack from the floorboard in back of him, lifting it over the seat.

"Whatcha got?"

"Eight and a half each I gotta get on these. Thirty-four cents."

"Jesus. That's fuckin' LUGERS. I don't want fuckin' Lugers."

"Hey. Dem's fucking P-Thirty-eights. Dey ain't fucking Lugers."

"Whatever the fuck dey are I don't wannum. Dey look like fuckin' LUGERS. I want Thirty-eights. Fucking REVOLVERS, for Chrissakes."

"These are not fuckin' LUGERS, goddammit. This is my business here. We're talking genuine fucking Walther Parabellum P-Thirty-eights."

"I don't care if it's a paregoric model don't wave the motherfucker around f'crissakes."

"Yeah. The fuckin' chipmunks might see it out here. Look: you fire this bitch in a Holiday Inn and the round goes through your lady's head and through the wall and the headboard of the next-door-neighbor's room, his ole lady's head, the round comes outta her skull and goes bop onto a tit, bounces off the tit and lands on the fucking bedspread. You can send room service over to get the lead for you. We're training penetration here. A Luger isn't jack shit."

"I don't need no Holiday Inn gun, man. I wanna go through the wall of a Holiday Inn and clip somebody's ole lady I'll fucking drive through the sono-fabitch. I need a revolver."

"You don't know guns, man. No offense. I coulda got you garbage here. The sears that crystallize and shit. When the hammer is down you turn the thumb safety it locks the sear. But you turn this with the bitch cocked, a little steel arm trips the sear and the hammer falls on the safety not on the fucking pin like some of that postwar shit. You can jack a round in and BA-BOOM it fires the fucker. Suicide guns. Thirty-four is stealing these fuckers. These are rare. You say no I can do another thing and have nine hundred fifty apiece by domani, you understand?"

"Hey, all fucking due respect to you an' that shit, ya know, but you don't know guns any better'n me. You just a fucking thief same as me, ya know? All dis shit about how you got to go to Sears an' get a hammer an' that shit. But that's awright. I'll take the paregoric Lugers or whatever and I'll give you twenty-five for the sack, and I'll take the merch an' live with it even if they ain't fucking revolvers. So what'll it be? We gotta deal or what?"

"Hey, tell ya what, paisan, you give me twenty-five hundred, I give you a great piece. I got a brand-new Colt Government Model in forty-five ACP, fucker's customized, gunsmith blueprinted, tight as ten-year-old snatch and clean as Mary Green. Got checkered grips, got the ejector port'n' feed ramp ground down, got the wide spur hammer on it, speed-shooter safety, Pachmayr mainspring housing, adjustable trigger, speed-load lever, adjustable rear and combat blade sights, and I throw in a couple mags with special springs and cutaway feed lips. Twenty-five bills and you got it."

"I give you twenty-five for the four Luger deals here."

"Pasadena."

"Say what?"

"El Paso, baby. I need thirty-four beans. Cash American or I take my merch elsewhere. That's the deal."

"I'll go twenty-seven-fifty absolute tops. An' you throw in a couple hundred rounds of ammo."

Laughter.

"Listen, I really enjoyed it, hey. But I got to go do some things. Seriously. You want 'em at 3400 or no? Say the truth, now. I got to book."

"What about the ammo? I don't gotta buy the fuckin' ammo too, do I?"

"'Course you do, baby. I don't get that shit free either, dig?"

"Hey. Fuck it. I'll shop around, ya know." The car door.

"Listen. Gimme thirty-four hundred, I'll toss in four boxes of parabellum."

"Four what?"

"Four boxes of nine-mm. That's it. Thirty-four beans cash now."

"Awright. Fuck it." Pause.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten . . . . "

Spain had started to squeeze the trigger and the light popped on in the car as the door opened and his man got out. He had an M-31 loaded in the tube. He'd built it himself from a practice rifle grenade, one of the demilled jobs with the fuse and explosives out and with the copper cone where the shaped charge goes intact. Fins in real good shape. He squeezed as the man ducked back in the window and the man was leaning in and counting, "Eight, nine, ten, two thousand, and one, two, three, four," peeling off hundreds when the shaped charge exploded against the side of the car. He heard the coughing plop when the charge exploded out toward him, but by the time his mind had registered the sound and he'd paused long enough to look over toward the trees his head and upper torso had turned to red, disintegrating Alpo; the driver and the car and the sack of "Lugers" and the rest of him were all blown to scarlet shit in a flaming orange ball of fiery, explosive death.

Spain turned and began moving back through the trees, climbing back up through the tall grass toward the highway. He glanced back once at the inferno burning down on the road, the billowing, black, oily smoke a strong chemical smell. The Mercedes was still intact but the flame should ignite the tank soon, and he spat once and turned back breathing deeply of the fumes and the mixture of gasoline aromas wafting from the wake of the passing traffic. He got in and started the engine, listening for the blast as he pulled out onto the highway.

Bud Leech and Eichord were on their way to knock on a couple of late doors when Leech rogered a call on the two-way.

"Eighty-one-eleven," he told the dispatcher, which was the numerical designation for the Intel unit.

The radio voice gave him the word and they were on the way to the crime scene in a hail of static and incomprehensible copspeak. Eichord recognized "forty-three-oh-four," a number of the Homicide Bureau, and "Castle Road," and that was about it. They were northbound, moving fast in a marked scout unit, Eichord having to concentrate to follow the twists and turns and then giving up and relaxing as they sped through the nighttime traffic.

"I have no idea where we are."

"Know which district you're in?"

"I'm not even sure what state I'm in."

Leech smiled and said, "Just remember the high numbers are the districts north of St. Louis, north of town that is, and —" The radio interrupted. He exchanged another brief bit of cryptic copspeak and told Eichord, "It's a car bombing." Another homicide or two in the growing file that was called "Russo" after the hood whose murder had precipitated the gang war.

Bud Leech worked the field. He was technically an intelligence supervisor but he'd come from a smalltown background where you did it all; you secured a crime scene all by your lonesome, took the pictures, gathered the evidence, came back and wrote it up, investigated, you were a one-man team. Now he was a watcher. He watched the religious cultists, the dudes with the paramilitary club who got off on mere fantasies, all kinds of things beside what feel under the usual "organized crime" provinces of gambling, pros, extortion, loan-sharking, porn, and of course, the biggie narcotics.

"What is your procedure as to who rolls on a homicide call," Eichord asked as the scout car shot through the cars in the fast lane.

"How do you mean?"

"In terms of whether or not you hear about it?"

"Oh, I'm gonna hear about it all right. But you mean if the dispatcher calls us."

"Yeah."

"Anytime a call comes in to the dispatcher for homicide to respond — let's say to a fatal shooting — the first individual on the crime scene automatically calls for an ambulance, and if the victim appears to be dead four people automatically get the call. Five now with you. You got homicide, you got the medical examiner, you got the ET unit, and us."

"ET unit?"

"That's the mobile van. Evidence technician. So we've got a fairly well-preserved and -documented crime scene in many instances. The ET guys are right there with all the tools ready to have at it."

"Would there be exceptions in fatalities? Like where you'd never get called in?"

"Oh, sure. Like a traffic fatality. Something of that nature, sure."

"No. I mean, say they find some dude hanging from a rope in a fleabag hotel. Suicide note pinned to his chest and he's swinging from the light fixture. You gonna be there on the scene?"

"No. Probably not in that case. No."

"No."

The perpetrator or perps unknown had been very lucky, Leech and Eichord learned upon arriving at the crime scene. The lieutenant was already there and Springer told them, "At least two dead. Bodies absolutely blown to shit. May be a third one dead. One in that vehicle" — he points in the direction of some charred and smoking rubble, and then at the wreckage of a car on its side in the nearby field — "and there's some human remains over by that one." He glances at some notes. "Eighty-eight Mercedes registered to one Anthony Tripotra, a.k.a Tony Trip. Muscle in the Dagatina family. No way to tell on this other one."

"The guys that did this got lucky as hell. There's nobody home in any of the farmhouses and homes on down this way. And all the good citizens that heard the explosion goin' by up on the highway, all the smoke'n' shit, nobody called it in to us. We wouldn't be here if Fire hadn't caught a call on it."

"Hey! Lieutenant" — a uniformed officer and two detectives were over by the edge of the road poking around in the bushes and trees — "over here." One of the homicide cops, a detective named Richard Glass, was holding up a shell casing of some kind in an evidence bag. The smell was offensive beyond belief as the smoke wafted toward them.

"All the earmarks of a pro whack-out."

"Right." Eichord looked at the contents of the bag. A technician was walking down the road with a weapon he'd found somewhere. It looked like what was left of a Walther P-38.

After several minutes of poking around, Leech and Eichord looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously, heading back to the scout unit.

"You've seen enough?" Leech asked.

"Yep."

"You didn't say much back there," Leech said as they got in the car. " I figured we'd see some real criminology goin' down but you just kinda poked around and stuff. I was pretty disappointed." He was grinning.

"Yeah. Well, it was an off day." They drove back toward the city. "You didn't say much either there, by the way. Real quiet."

"That's my thing, Jack. I don't do much. I just lay back in the weeds real cool."

"Um hmm."

"Check it out."

"See who the bad players are."

"Gotcha." Traditionally cars that roll on a homicide call the findings back to a district supervisor who would arrive and take charge of securing the scene. He would be maybe a detective sergeant but he would remain in charge no matter what kind of rank showed up subsequently. If the criteria met the right guidelines, then Eichord would eventually get a call. He wanted to make sure it was going to happen.

"What are the rulebook criteria for who gets called on a firebombing or any homicide of this nature?"

"Well. First .... somebody's gotta be fairly dead."

"Good. I agree, of corpse."

"Jesus. All right, I quit. Okay. It would like depend on case saturation. The call depends on that day's work load more than anything. But you can stop worrying. It happens now. Everybody knows. Jack Eichord gets in on the act first thing."

Bud Leech was the first cop he'd met in St. Louis other than Springer who'd been willing to give him shit all about anything. He looked over at the man. He had a hypognathous jaw and a large, broken beak that gave him almost a Dick Tracy look. All it would take was a less towering physique, and Leech could put on a snap-brim and a yellow trench coat and pass for the Gould comic strip hero. Eichord said:

"Give me a crime stopper."

"Huh?"

"You know, a Dick Tracy crime stopper. Something I can use in the investigation."

"Okay. If you want to take notes, it's fine. You ready?" Eichord grunted he was. "Don't step on your dick. That's a crime stopper!"

"Hell. There's no chance of that."

On the way back in, Leech told him about the special Intel unit. The functions had ranged from dignitary protection to maintaining an active watch file on the organized-crime dudes. Sometimes it worked as an independent unit. At other times it coordinated with state, county, or federal agencies, task forces like McTuff, DEA; it was big with the narcs. Their byword was informants. IRS, Leech called it: Informants, Research, and Surveillance.

Eichord knew all about informants. They became friends. Even though you never wanted to "go to bed" with them figuratively or any other way, you ended up doing it. There was a strong, undeniable bonding pattern that develops over the years between a cop and a snitch. Even the worst degenerate junkie is a human being just like you are. And if that person gives you important information and helps you make cases of any consequence, it is difficult not to look for their redeeming qualities.

They talked about it and Leech said, "I've got people I've been close to for nine, ten, eleven years. They don't owe me and I certainly don't owe them but they still give me good shit. Maybe nine, ten years back they got jammed up some way. Arrested, waiting trial, or trying to get clear of something, and that was how we got hold originally, but now there's nothing hanging over them and still they give. Same with you?"

"Yeah. Absolutely. And they do become friends."

"Right. Somebody helps you and it's just the nature of the relationship. If you're human, pretty soon you feel very friendly for them. It's weird."

"Love is strange."

"I remember that one, too. Mickey and Sylvia?"

"Chee-rist. You're even older than you look."

"I'm bigger than I look, too. So watch it, pal."

"You can't be bigger than you look, Godzilla. You look big enough to hunt geese with a rake." That broke him up.

"That's the second time I heard that one," he said, shaking his head.

"Only the second time?"

"Yeah. The first time I was nine years old."

Every crime scene Eichord remembered you'd get hit with a little shot from the sudden-death thing. It didn't matter how many times you saw it, even the most crusty, hardened ME felt something at the bad ones, some sense of waste, some nicker of remorse at the loss, or perhaps it would come on them slowly, layering its cumulative effect in a tiredness, manifesting itself in world-weary humor or black, low comedy. Anything to get you through it.

Eichord had seen the bad ones. The kids. The pets. The old folks. Whole families. Mass graves. Torture scenes that made paintings of hell look like Wyeth landscapes. There were some he'd never completely shake loose from.

Rolling through the night traffic they passed a place where the highway had been blasted through some boulders and on a rock about the size of Providence, Rhode Island, some moron had left a bit of late-twentieth-century wit and wisdom. There across the huge boulder, fading in the sunny passage of time, crudely spray-painted in shaky letters is the legend,

DEBBIE SUX

The lost generation. The beat generation. The megeneration. The hightech generation. And now, the Debbie Sux generation. Fucking words to live by.

Some future archeologists from the planet Garbanza X will have a time trying to decode some of our more primitive hieroglyphics. Jack Eichord thought to himself that he'd like to be there when the Exalted Chief Expositor of the Eleusinian Mysteries is called in to translate the profound meaning of "Debbie Sux."

John-boy was not so easy. He didn't drive a bright-yellow Volkswagen with vanity plates reading SOLDIER. But professional or not, Johnny Picciotti would go down like a stone. Easy and greasy.

He lived in an apartment hotel — didn't any of these assholes own a fucking home? — But, no problem. Spain used a man he'd farmed a couple of jobs out to in the past. Told him to be in front of the place at a certain time. To wait. A woman would tell him when he could go up.

Spain was across the street in another vehicle watching his worker as he talked to Greta about some mythical duties she would be fulfilling in the future, but both watching his watcher and waiting for Picciotti, whom he'd nailed to a fairly regular schedule. Johnny usually left for Blue Kriegal's place about a quarter to ten every morning. He was on time this morning.

"We'll be bringing in about five thousand boxes at a time. They'll be flats, and what you'll do is hire a couple of kids to put these together and stack them up when we start . . . Uh, say listen, do me a favor, I've got to go meet someone. See that man in the blue car there?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Do me a favor." Spain pulled a money clip out of his pocket and peeled off a twenty. "Walk over there and tap on his window and just say, Go on up. He'll know what you mean."

"Go on up?"

"Right. It'll save me a couple minutes 'cause he always wants to talk to me and I just don't have the time to waste and, you know, I just don't like to be rude but he's one of those guys who never shuts up." They both smiled.

She said, "Sure. Just say, go on up. I don't need to tell him anything else?"

"No." He put the twenty-dollar bill in her hand. "Then just walk back across the street and ..." He turned around. "See that cab-stand over there?" She nodded. "Just take a cab on back to the office." He had to check himself from telling her to keep the change. He knew she would account for the fare the next time he saw her and probably agonize over what percent tip to give the driver. He thanked her and she got out and started across the street as he pulled away from the curb.

He drove around the block. Waited a sixty-second count. Slowly eased up into a parking area next to a business down the block from the cabstand. He waited until he saw the woman walking across the street, going over to the first taxi. Driver gets out. Opens a door. She gets in. They seem to sit there forever. Finally the cab pulls out. Spain starts the engine, pulls his car up in front of the apartment hotel. Goes straight on in and takes the elevator up to Picciotti's floor. The door is unlocked, which is what he has just paid a man he's never allowed to see him over a thousand dollars for.

Spain goes in and starts brewing coffee, making himself right at home. He's locked the door. Now all he has to do is settle down, relax and wait for Mr. Picciotti to return home. The maid's laundry cart from the fourth floor has mysteriously disappeared. It's in Picciotti's bedroom. Johnny won't be leaving here on his feet, I'm afraid, Spain thinks with a smile.

It is three-thirty in the afternoon when Spain, relaxed, reading on Johnny's satin bedspread, hears the key in the door and he quickly gets to his feet and waits behind the bedroom door. No noise for a minute, then a blaring television set is turned on and Spain reaches for his .25 automatic and eases into the room.

"Don't," he says, pointing at Johnny Soldier's surprised face. "Don't even think about it, Johnny. If this was a hit you'd already be greased, right?"

"Wha' the fuck ya wan'?"

"Attaboy," Spain says, pulling a piece out of the man's holster. He can barely get it loose. "Some fast-draw rig you got there. A PPK." Spain laughs. "What are you, James fucking Bond?"

"Who d' fuck are ya?"

"This is who I am, asshole." He kneecaps him and Picciotti drops to the carpet in pain.

"You're dead, you piece a' shit," Picciotti grunts.

"Yes, eventually we all end up that way. Well," He goes over and snicks cuffs on the man, but Johnny pulls away before Spain can get them both on properly so he kicks Johnny in the head, catching him with a pointed toe in the side of the neck, and finishes getting the cuffs on.

"How d'ya like working for Blue, Johnny? Good job, is it?" He kicks the man again, in the face this time, then goes into the bathroom and gets a couple of hand towels and a washcloth for a gag.

"You're going to tell me all about Blue and the boys. All about the operation, you wop peckerhead, but first we'll take a little ride. Okay?" He wheels the maid's cart in. Johnny is bleeding out of his mouth and Spain soaks one of the towels in it and puts the towel in a plastic bag.

After Picciotti is off-loaded, his next chore is to take Johnny's car keys and unlock the man's vehicle and wipe the bloody towel across the headrest. Just a bit of theater. This done — they leave.

The spur had been a busy linkage shunt at one point but the tracks had long since been torn up for scrap. Everything was gone now except the deep scar through the woods where the railroad trains had once run parallel to the water's edge and several hundred meters inland. It was all gone now. The railroad had literally vanished. The county had even hauled away the gravel in the roadbed, every pebble, every scrap, right down to the dusty spikes, dumping the detritus and junk over various backroads throughout the Missouri boonies. And for a long time to come, farmers would remember the railroad when their pickups rolled rubber over the odd errant spike.

Spain pulled his vehicle well off the roadbed and into a light, declivitous place adjacent to where the county had blocked off the roadway with a stout barricade of treated cross ties. There was a big oak nearby and the vehicle fit nicely between two of the huge root systems that had come reaching out of the low spot like gigantic, gnarled fingers. He started carrying tools and material over toward the water's edge.

It was a tiny spot that was secluded and totally invisible from virtually every angle but one, a natural cove made by erosion from the bank forming a small O with a pie slice eaten out of it by the river. The sign back on the road identified it as a Headwater Diversion Channel. As he looked down into the moving waters it looked deep and muddy even inside the little cove, and he wondered idly how many rivers fed this body of water he was looking at. He supposed the Mississippi, the Ohio, maybe even the muddy Mo, and he spat down into it and walked back for more.

His load broke a sweat on him in no time and the cool breeze felt good as it dried him. He unloaded three feed sacks partially filled with small rocks he'd shoveled off a county road — maybe one of them had come from here in the first place — and a few broken bricks he'd found near a construction site. He had a half-dozen bags which he began filling with loose dirt and closing with twist-'em wire-closures. He had a razor-sharp sickle, a spade, a post-hole digger, gloves and an abandoned wooden door which he'd sawed off to six feet by roughly two and a half.

He sickled his way into a likely spot and began carving out a two-foot-wide, six-foot-long trench with the sharp digger. He was very strong and the blades bit into the soft surface soil easily. His goal was to go down three feet and he put a lot into it, not particularly pacing himself or holding back, but working with grim determination. In a few minutes he'd pulled out so much dirt that he had to start filling bags or move into the hole. He liked the leverage he had at the trench's edge, so he took time to fill the plastic bags and when the hole was accessible he started again.

The sun was falling now and it was setting spectacularly across the river along the horizon, and it shot dappled orange and peach and crimson highlights through the willows bent gracefully out along the water's edge and along the banks choked with dog fennel and foxtail, thorn and thistle, creeper vine and cockle-bur, ragweed and chigger-weed, poke and poison ivy. But Spain saw none of it, standing there on the edge of Mother Nature's leafy wonderment, digging a shallow grave as the jarflies and mosquitoes and frogs sang relentlessly.

Something cracked through the wall of insane concentration and for that moment the one called Spain realized where he was and his surroundings permeated the dense death haze that he carried with him now. He had impressive banks of information stored away. Trivial and important knowledge. Minutiae he'd accumulated in his half a lifetime such as the fact that the Indians had once made a tobaccolike mixture called kinnikinnick. It came back to him in that moment when his eyes observed sumac and dogwood bark, relaying the message to his brain cells, and in that flush of cognition he realized that all the rain had kept much of the green here. Ladue had been barren-looking when he left for the South. The thought, lonesome amid the rest of the screaming abnormality, fled, and he was pleased at the way the recent rains had left the earth easy to dig in.

When he had the grave he wanted, neatly rectilinear and ready for its occupant, he went back to get Johnny Picciotti, Blue Kriegal's bodyguard. He was lighter than he looked, Spain noticed as he dropped the man's mummied form into the shallow grave and began filling it carefully, tamping the pieces of broken brick in and then starting on the dirt. From time to time a muffled scream would be audible, but when the first layers of bricks and rock and dirt covered it, you couldn't hear much. Just frogs, mosquitoes, and the incessant buzz of the jarflies.

"Glad we could have this little chat," he tells the silent earth.

The phone by the bedside table rang and the man picked it up, having to reach over the sleeping body of an inert young boy to lift it from the cradle.

"Eh?" he grunted into the phone, glancing over at the clock that had some kind of fancy numbers some decorator thought looked good and he could never tell what the fuck time it was.

"Boss?"

"Who d' fuck is this?"

"Boss, this is Blue."

"What d' fuck ya doin' calling me dis time a' da fuckin' night?"

"BOSS! Walk up, f' shit sake it's important."

"What?"

"Can I talk?"

"Fuck, I dunno. No. Whatd'ya want, goddammit?"

"I gotta talk to ya."

"Fuck it. What?" He rubbed at the sleep in his eyes.

"Dey got Johnny."

"Whadya fuckin' mean dey got Johnny."

"Johnny. He's fuckin' disappeared. We got his car."

"No fuckin' way, He's prob'ly wit' a broad. Fuck it. Go back ta sleep."

"... f' shit sake, wake up, goddammit. They got him."

"Who got him? Whatd' fuck ya talkin' bout f' the ten't damn time?"

"Rikla dat piece'a shit got him. We got d' car. Deres blood innit."

"Blood?"

"Blood, gaddammit, on d' headrest thing dere. RIKLA he hit Johnny d' no good piece of SHIT his fuckin' children should DIE! Hadda be fuckin' RIKLA!"

"When?"

"Huh?"

"Whenja fina car?"

"Jus' now. Me'n' Gino found it."

"How long has Johnny been gone?"

"Since las' night. I mean, we figured like you, ya' know, it hadda be a broad or a fuckin' game or sum'pin', but we finally go up dere to dat place where he lives an' look inna gargage and we checked inside d' car an der's the goddamn bloodstains'n' shit."

"He could be hurt. Inside. Not answerin' d' phone."

"Naw. We got the super guy to let us in. Nobody up der. RIKLA NAILED HIM, de fuckin' cock-sucker."

"How do you know so fuckin' sure?"

"Who d' fuck else gonna be wit' de balls to hit Johnny Soldier, f' shit sake? Hit him where he lives like dat. You know it hadda be some fuckin' som'bitch wit' no respec' for where a man lives. Dat fuckin' Rikla garbage go inside an' clip a man where he lives. An one of US ain't gon' clip a guy where d' guy fuckin' LIVES, goddammit."

"Yeah. Well." The man sat up and yawned, rubbed his eyes again, looking at the thin boy asleep beside him or pretending to be asleep. "Get Buck n' Lowenstein. You and Gino meet me at d' other place in about ..." He glanced at the clock again. "Fuckin' goddamn shit clock it don' even tell the fuckin' time. Fuck it. Meet me over dere in half an hour. Bring ya tools 'n' shit. I don't guess we got to take dat fuckin' shit."

One of the main reasons he couldn't concentrate was he had Ritafication on the brain. Tonight's the night, he kept thinking. It was amazing to him the way he could always revert to a sixteen-year-old kid mentally at the mere cross of a leg in a high-heeled shoe. I mean, healthy is one thing, but Holy Moly, Captain Marvel, gimme a break here.

So Rita Paul now Haubrich of the legs and the red hair was the way he rationalized it. Whatever the real reason, this case was still a jellied blur.

The whole day had been spent first with Springer and a couple of homicide and organized-crime guys trying to do a chalk talk which had him so confused he erased it from his slate and tried his own simplistic version on a legal pad. It began like so:

THE TWO TONYS GANG

Cypriot (gone/NY?) Dago (slams)

Rikla . . . Measure Russo . . . Venable

He said to a detective nearby. "Hey, Glass?"

"Yeah?"

"Who is Johnny Picciotti?"

"Johnny Soldier. Punk worked for Measure's people. Blue Kriegal's bodyguard but it looks like the job's open. Appears he got himself snuffed."

"But no body, right?"

"Yeah. He's in the foundation of some new condo out in Lake St. Louis."

"Uh-huh," T. J. Monahan said, "or he's got compacted in the trunk of an old junker out at Used Car City."

"Right. He's now the rear bumper of a Dodge Omni."

"And Tony Tripotra. Was he with Rikla or Measure?"

"He WAS with Rikla. He's with the angels now. Dead muscle. A thief. Had a package behind ADW and an armed-robbery thing that he beat. I doubt if he ever made his bones even. Just a guinea moke for Rikla."

"How did Blue Kriegal get the name Blue?"

"Blue movies," somebody suggested.

"Naw," Pat Skully said. "It was because he blue so many little boys." Eichord thought it had warmed up a little or maybe it was just that he'd become punchy with the information overload.

"EEEhhhhh," Leech called out to him as he clomped through the squad room in his size-fourteen wides, "How's the Capo di Tutti Frutti today?" He said to Eichord.

"Sweet as ever and never been kissed." But fixing to remedy that situation, he hoped.

He shaved again for the date. Cut himself nicely, which was always a good sign, and looked at himself in a favorite sport coat and decided, No way. Ung. Not a shot in the world. He could feel his Right Guard going even as he pulled up in front of her place. She looked. What's the word? Gorgeous doesn't cover it. She looked like . . . Oh, let's be calm. Precise. We're a trained observer, he thought. She looks YIP P P P-EEEEEEE!

She was nice. Everything about her was nice. She looked very nice. Smelled nice. Smiled nice. Talked nice. Thought nice. This is going to be a nice, breathlessly boring date. Niceing each other to death.

She suggested a place at his request and it was — right — nice. A quiet, dark but not too dark, nice little place with good service and probably good food and wine. He didn't taste anything because he had Rita Haubrich to look at and taste. Pitiful and nobody's proud of being a slobbering, drooling sex maniac, but these are the facts, ma'am.

Rita drank a chilled white wine which she had to order as he had been struck numb, dumb, and pantingly goofy by the tactile senses that her presence had assaulted. He ordered something and it sat there untouched in front of him while they talked.

Yes, dammit to blazes, it was NICE talking with her about all kinds of things. He liked her a bunch and she seemed to be able to somehow tolerate Eichord, even laughing at his attempts at good humor. But then who wouldn't be charmed by the sophisticated, rapier wit and hilariously piercing bon mots such as the following:

"Well, how time flies," she had said to him with her big smile lighting up the dark corners of the restaurant. "We've been talking, or I should say I have been talking on and on. Did you want to do something else this evening?" And Jack Eichord replied — and get this now for some of that repartee, he didn't hesitate a moment — he replied brilliantly, "Hammma, hammma, ham-mma," which she had the taste to think was sublimely funny. She had probably seen various folk struck numb, dumb, and pantingly goofy before. She was what they used to call a looker. She had always been pretty. But now she was nothing less than SENSATIONAL.

They had fun talking and they sat there for hours making fools out of themselves not in the least. Rita kidded him that he was the first adult male she'd ever known who wasn't a lawyer.

"Are you sure you didn't become a lawyer in all that time?"

"I assure you I —"

"Promise." She made a pretty face. "Cops sometimes study for the bar."

"Cross my heart. Defense rests." He knew when to let a straight line go by untouched.

"Are you WANTING to be a lawyer?"

"'Fraid not. Is that good or bad?"

"Yes, probably one or the other but irrelevant. It's just so very wonderfully different. You are the only adult of the male persuasion I've ever met in the last twenty years who wasn't a lawyer."

"Still just a plain old cop."

"Cop, maybe. Old, ehhhh. Plain. Huh-uh." She laughed. She looked at his dark black hair flecked with gray, and dark eyes that bored into her soulfully, and that was when it happened.

"Oh, shucks," he said, summoning up a hidden wellspring of conversational brilliance. Thrilled to his sex-mad core. He LOVED St. Louis.

"You know," he began, some lame crap just to say something and he just couldn't finish the stupid sentence. He was absolutely bowled over by her and he let it hang there unfinished, just looking at her in admiration.

"Yeah?" is what another woman might have said to his unfinished dialogue. She thought it and he understood. And he thought that she could read the sincerity in his eyes. It was ridiculous, of course, but it was so damned biochemical and metaphysical and dad-gummed blue-eyed fun that he just nodded at her as if to say, Yes, I agree it was nice to be able to have a conversation without speaking. And then suddenly both of them got very self-conscious about it and at the exact moment Rita started to say, "It's interesting how a person can —" he started to say, "Have you ever considered the fact —" and they said them in unison and both broke up laughing and then they said, "Go ahead."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You go ahead, I wasn't going to say anything either."

"Would you believe I'm having lots of fun sitting here having the dumbest conversation that has ever been held?"

"Me too." And he wanted to ask her if he took an ink pen and connected all the little tiny dots on her body would it be some kind of far-out beautiful Picasso-like Cubistic artwork? And could he try that later, maybe? He could use something water-soluable. He had other thoughts, too.

They talked about old times. The St. Louis they both loved back in the delightful, SoHoish Gaslight Square days that made the town seem like an oasis of hip in the hopeless desert of the Midwest. They laughed about a district attorney, a preposterous guy who both of them still remembered. She told him all about her dad, a former judge and lawyer turned pol and long since retired. Her brother was a well-known criminal lawyer in Kansas City, and her former husband, Winslow Haubrich, was an upwardly mobile trust lawyer with North, Haubrich and Dechter, a firm solidly plugged into the St. Louis banking system.

Pretty soon they found themselves flirting with each other uncontrollably, and then they started laughing at themselves and that was fun too. It was as if the intervening years had never happened. And Jack didn't know for certain but he thought if she'd just let him kiss her once he could go home and compose a 300,000-word essay about that face with its special collection of perfections. Delicate bones that stopped just on the comfortable side of being cover-girl, traffic-stopper looks. Yippee.

Ex-husband notwithstanding he sensed a kind of virginal, fresh, and tender thing about her. Rita looked like one of those girls whom you take back to their apartment and it's all chintz and lace and four-poster-bed room and plants out the kazoo, Lautrec on the wall or a bullfight poster, or worse — horses or velvet children with the eyes — but she wasn't. She was one great, fan-damn-tastic, ummmmmmm-good, super surprise.

"God!" he said again. "Rita PAUL! From out of nowhere," And that broke both of them up again.

On the way to her place he started making a list of the things that were phenomenal about this lady. He'd start just with her face. Just the purely physical stuff:

1. The red hair

2. The lips (a: smile) (b: corners) (c: fullness) (d: coloration)

3. The nose

4. The chin

5. The eyes

6. The eyelashes

7. The eyebrows (he'd never looked at eyebrows before)

8. The cheeks (a: cheekbones) (b: flawless skin)

9. The ears

10. The forehead.

She was the first woman he could ever remember seeing about whom he could actually say there were ten beautiful things just above the neck alone and that's not counting the back of her head, her teeth, her tongue, et cetera.

But even before he got to the wonderful sloping upper chest and that long and lovely throat and the other 469 things he thought were terrific about Rita, there was the apartment. One more surprise.

She'd met him at the door, so he hadn't seen inside her apartment. He was surprise to find it sparse, white, and functional. Not that high-tech crap with all the chrome things and everything all self-consciously spherical and slick, but a great pad. Even the greenery looked good. He liked everything about this lady.

She was another one of those rather pretty women who age like wine. The ones who suddenly wake up one day in their late twenties to find out they've done something miraculous. Or rather that God has. He's let them turn sensational-looking while they were asleep. Because those women sometimes seem to get that way overnight. It's not a slow, evolutionary thing, but a fast, breathtaking process that comes on them while asleep. And plain Jane wakes up one morning in Knockout City. Reasonably pretty Rita wakes up beautiful.

It doesn't happen a lot. But when it does, it can be heady stuff and not every woman or man can deal with it. A woman like that sometimes can get a real crush on her mirror if she isn't careful. Not Rita. She handled it by not believing she was sensational-looking at all. She laughed at Eichord's compliments. He told her how pretty she was and it really put her away and she laughed hard and the laughter was genuine. What a comic he was. And that knocked him out too.

Mr. Haubrich had helped her ignore the striking reflection in the mirror. She told Jack he still helped her. Anytime she thought she was pretty neat stuff all she had to do was remember the day she'd come home and made dinner and waited for him to come home as usual and the burning humiliation of the phone call from his MOTHER. HIS MOTHER, for God's sake. He didn't even have the style to tell her himself. Even a note taped to the pillow.

Anything but his goofy mother calling to explain that Winslow wouldn't be home that night . . . Oh my God, the embarrassment! She still couldn't take the thought of that phone call and everything it represented to her.

Finally the shock wore off a little and Rita realized that crazy Win and his secretary could go right up in smoke for all she cared and that getting on with her life was the immediate priority item. As more time passed she began to look on it as the blessing that it was. Her husband had been a weak, self-centered kissass heading up the corporate trust ladder with Daddy's contacts and a doting Mommy who still kept him tied to her by the apron umbilical.

Eichord's impression of Rita was that she looked like a sticker who didn't run from problems. She would have been willing to keep trying.

She said, "My marriage vows were serious stuff to me. It really was what I'd committed myself to forever."

"Once I said the same thing, but I let a demon get hold of me."

"For me his leaving was a positive thing in the end. I may have taken a pretty good shot to the old self-esteem but it let a lot of fresh air back into my life."

"My ex-wife probably could say the very same thing. I wasn't marriage material for anybody. I doubt if I would be for anybody. It takes a lot to keep a marriage going in my line of work. You give so much of your time to it. It isn't fair, truly, to subject a spouse to that kind of second place in a partnership."

"Maybe not. Maybe so. But there are cops with great marriages, no?"

"Some. Sure. But I think as many cop marriages go sour. You've got a lot of strikes against you right off the bat." He suddenly switched metaphor because suddenly every sentence that went through his mind had the word "balls" in it.

They dimmed the lights and talked more and soon they kissed and it was so soft and tender a beginning that he nearly laughed out loud at the marvel and sheer pleasure of it and rightness and oh, baby, yes, the niceness of it. The unexpected reunion had created a hothouse atmosphere for both of them.

She wore a white, long-sleeved blouse and no jewelry. She had a beautiful body. Breasts that were almost too good to be real. The kind of classic, luscious melons that look so soft and white but spring firm to the touch, perfectly proportioned, neither small nor overly large. A tight, flat belly and smallish rib cage that suddenly curved out in a pair of gorgeous globes.

She turned and lowered the lights completely, turning on a single light behind her, the rest of the apartment in darkness. Her legs. My God. She was showgirl, pony, absolute yippee all the way. What a pair of lovely legs she had.

He had the odd and awesome sensation of having something deliciously sweet in his mouth, and he breathed deeply of her body's uniquely feminine fragrance. She still had on her glasses and as she turned on those legs that he couldn't quit staring at she pulled her glasses off and it was like a striptease. Just that alone was. And that long, giraffe neck and the model's chin, the long neck and throat curving out like a Modigliani, and the throat and beautiful upper chest minutely freckled in kissable texture he would have to investigate closely, and those killer legs in the little scanty panties and up very close he could see almost invisible veins in her long, alabaster legs that just kept going and going.

Against the light her hot and lovely body was silhouetted in the sheerness of the silky, wispy thing that covered her breasts, falling away in an inverted V in front and the perfection of her dazzled him with desire and inflamed him.

The long flame of hair curved and caressed her as it dropped long and straight then following the lovely lines of her throat down through the soft shadows.

Her eyes blazed at him wanting him back and he imagined tasting that full, hot mouth soon burning himself on their lust. He watched her and she watched him and they took their time tasting the anticipation of it. He let his eyes travel up and down that gorgeous body standing there profiled for him. High, firm breasts pushing through the wispiness, nipples thrusting and pointing at him, erect and ready to explode with the heat of a touch, a flat and beautiful stomach — a teenager's tummy, so smooth and supple — and then the classic curves as the body flared out into a woman's sexy hips and the shadowy triangle of her little, soft bush in the tiny diaphanous bikini panties, and the long, long loooonnnnnngggg perfection of legs, down to high heels. A sultry picture of pure sex.

She stood there unmoving. Absolutely rigid. Lancing him with her heat and beauty. Telling him that this — all of this — was his to take and use, and his brain overdosed on the fire that had spread through his body and he pulled her down.

Neither of them quite believed it. It was over so quickly for both of them and exploding out of them together in the thing that started as tenderness but crushing, demanding, consuming came together in a molten release that was so fast they just lay there together, Eichord still in her, she still clinging to him, both of them wet, soaked, sledgehammered, steamrollered, hung out to dry. And she said softly to him, "I want romance and I want it now," and he understood.

Later he sat on the edge of the bed beside her, with all the lights on, both of them nude, and he stared at all of her an inch or so at a time, just drinking her in and so obviously stoned on it she laughed and asked him, "Hey, buddy. Watcha starin' at?"

"Modigliani," he said, enraptured by the long curving throat and flawless upper chest.

"Never mind that Bo Diddley stuff," she said. "Let's screw." And he fell off the bed and laughed until he cried. And when he'd calmed down she got down on the floor with him and they did it on her bedroom rug. A first, she told him. And they agreed that America was a phenomenal place.

Eichord had been still for a long time. Listening to her deep breathing, and it startled him when she asked him, "You asleep?" in a quiet voice.

"No," he said softly.

"What were you thinking about?"

"Nothin'," he lied. Shaking his head and turning the corners of his mouth down. "Absolutely zero." Vowing that he would see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

The old man sat quietly eating his dinner. It was not the standard prison fare. There was fresh fruit. Excellent fish. He tasted nothing. The frustration of it all was enough to make you go mad. He had to summon up all his willpower, which was considerable, to keep his patience. He was too old for all of this. What garbage the thing of theirs had become. He shook his head slightly and took another small bite of fruit.

He fumbled with his reading bifocals trying to get them out of the case which he dropped and ignored, not even watching as the large, frightening-looking man who stood behind him quickly and silently retrieved the case and placed it beside him, returning to his position to the old man's rear.

What had these boys become? Fucking Paulie and Jimmie. His goddamn brothers in the thing. Fighting each other and killing and breaking the oath right and left. You didn't kill someone where he lived. Not even if there was a contract. It just wasn't done. If you caught him with your daughter, maybe then you clip him near his home, but never like this. He tried to read about it in the summary.

He could do nothing. It hurt him to piss, it hurt him to shit, it hurt him not to shit. His old fingers were painfully arthritic and the first words he read set him off again. Jimmie the Hook. Crazy Lyle. Fucking maniacs shot at Toot Smith down in the middle of Laclede fucking Landing with people all over the fucking place. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, blessed Virgin, Holy Mother of God, what an I gonna do?

The Commission couldn't give less of a shit about the family's problems out in St. Louis. He was expected to run this thing from JAIL?

He took a series of shallow breaths, his little bird chest wheezing, huffing, and puffing, ancient, abused lungs sucking air as best they could. Fucking prison air on top of everything else. Just more than a human being could stand. And the brotherhood expects me to pull this shit back together for them. He raised the first finger of his right hand a couple of inches from the table and felt the presence behind him moving and a looming shadow draw near at his command.

"Where's, uh —" Oh, Christ in His Heaven, now I can't think of his name. Finally it came to him. "Where's Duke? Is he in population?" His voice was thin and raspy.

"No, sir," the voice rumbled like gravel loose in a metal pan. "I 'tink Duke's down in Ad Seg."

The old man nodded. "Get him." And the large shadow moved.

A few minutes later there were footsteps and two men entered his room.

"Siddown," he said to the man after they gave each other the formal greeting of respect.

"Duke" — he slid the paper across the table — "I want the word out. Enough is enough. The next one who violates this thing of ours, the next — outlaw — that's it. He goes under. Give it to Big Mike Stricoti and Jack Nails. Tell them to get their own crew. Whoever it is. I want that shit clipped."

Spain sleeps. And in a sleep of death this man to whom control is so all important dreams that all control is lost.

A cloaked finger approaches from the shadows of the dream and a skeletal, clawed hand emerges from the folds of the dark cloak, tossing ancient bones from a skull cup.

The secret oracle gazes at the bones and foretells of sudden and violent occurrence.

Somewhere in the Orient a sage writes of myriad straw dogs, and high on a mountaintop an aged holy man pierces a veil of understanding.

A secret society prepares a virgin for ritual slaughter. Spain sees that it is his daughter.

A once-sentient mind now begins to recede into a dark, inner chamber where sense, impression, and response cannot penetrate. A bioelectrical circuit breaker is thrown. The chamber goes to black.

The dreamer lifts a hammered goblet that once held the blood of Christ, and drinks deeply of serpent venom. He sees the fissures of his brain transubstantiated into a nest of writhing eels.

The cold, inky force of the nightmare pulls him down, and two hundred fathoms below the surface he is held in a powerful, swirling whirlpool.

He dreams of giant sea snakes and mutant water scorpions and eyeless, slithering things that come to transfuse him again with devil-filth, and the oracle tells him he will return to the surface world to do murder by skill and magic. And he spirals up through the black, rushing helix at the command

"Expunge!"

The following day Spain rested. And the following night he made a totally random kill. Parking a stolen car out in front of the Robert Schindler Building across from the Press Club, a few blocks from police headquarters, walking in and looking at some names on a rubber nameplate thing by the elevator. And when the elevator man came over to him and asked him if he could help him, something in the man's tone, his pigmentation, sent Spain into a fury and without warning or a hint of premeditation (yet he had stolen a car), he pulled Mary Pat from her sheath taped to his left forearm and stabbed the diminutive elevator operator/doorman to death there in the lobby of the Schindler Building.

Back home and safely ensconced in the rental house he was busily remodeling to suit his bizarre and terrifying needs, he played with Pat, tossing the nine-inch stiletto into the soft wood of the table where it stuck again and again. He had read Leslie Charteris as a boy and remembered the dagger that The Saint had named after a woman — Anna, was it? And he named this deadly bitch after his wife and gave her blood to drink.

The stiletto stuck in the soft pine again, the cruciform silhouette casting its shadow along the tabletop. The appearance was exactly that of a crucifix, the shaft and guard making the sign of the cross, the grooves and relief work of the turned metal grip suggesting the crucified body of the Savior.

He took the thing and flung it with a vengeance across the room from him, hurling it by the point, throwing it with that practiced movement of the arm that he had developed over two decades throwing every type of knife — dagger, dirk, screwdriver, sharpened pencil, all manner of pointed and edged objects — and Pat bit into the wall with a comforting thwocking sound as the shadow of the cruciform fell against the wall, suggesting someone who had been crucified upside down and Spain set there staring at the stiletto in his wall, feeling a chill touch him there in the very warm, empty house. And Spain was now mad as a hatter. And he sat there quietly gritting his teeth, thinking about how good it was to stab the elevator operator whose tone of voice and coloration evoked the image of Gaetano Ciprioni. But he knew he would retain the professional control necessary to achieve his ultimate goal. That degree of controlled resolve would not desert him in his madness. Killing, after all, was what he did.

For three days Jack Eichord had been tied up with the flood of violence and then he had time to breathe and he called Rita.

"I've missed you desperately," she told him, and all he could do was breathe into the phone.

"I know, you've missed me too. I can tell by the way you're panting."

"Yeah," he told her very seriously.

"What is happening here?" she asked him.

"What?"

"What's happening to us?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, you rascal you."

"Oh, you mean that?"

"Yes. That."

"It's a biological phenom that I've read about in books. It's quite natural."

"Oh, that's good, then."

"It's very good, in fact."

"Does it have a name?"

"Yes, it thurtently doth," he said, sounding for some inane reason like a cat in the cartoons. "It means we're falling in sex."

"How romantic."

"Would you like a little romance tonight?"

"I could probably squeeze you into my busy schedule."

"Squeeze me about seven, say?"

"Consider yourself squeezed."

"I've missed you too. A lot."

Even better the second time? he asked himself afterward. No way. But it had been. So wonderful. They lay there laughing like fools, so pleased with each other and the nice discoveries. She fingered his second belly button, a puckered navel where an old wound had eventually smoothed over.

"You've led an interesting life, I see."

"Unquestionably, my dear Watson."

"What made this? Did someone bite you here?" She touched its indentation.

"Probably." He said as he felt the small groove that was a long, forgotten souvenir from a blocked Fairbairn thrust. "Ancient history."

"I feel sure it must be from a woman. A bite."

They sought each other's mouths and her tongue zapped him like the touch of a high-voltage line and he was copper winding down to a long, coiled grounding shaft that took the power hungrily and fed on it and he reached deeply to take as much of her hot, sweet lightning as he could, letting the energy of the electricity charge them in a crackling surge of current.

"Who is it?" Eichord said to Bud Leech, who was already on the crime scene.

"Little joker named Betters. They really played Hurt You with this boy. Hope you've had dinner already."

"Hey, Bud," one of the Homicide people said to Leech, nodding to Eichord.

"Yo."

"Can they take him?"

"Uh, hold it. Not yet, babe. Tell 'em hold it a few minutes."

"Okay."

"Small time jive-ass little punk named Vinnie Betters. Some gofer in with Measure." He shook his head. "I don't know what this is about," he said, jerking his thumb toward the kitchen on the word "this."

"You get done dusting yet?"

"Naw."

"Smells great in here."

"Jesus." Eichord put a handkerchief up to his face.

"Herrrrrrrre's Vinnie."

Eichord looked and turned away after a bit.

"Obviously whoever did this —"

"Yeah." He laughed without humor. "You could say that, all right."

"Seriously. Whatever the reason why he was killed, whoever did it was trying to get something out of their system. Nothing professional about that."

"I figure two, three, maybe four guys taking turns. Really getting themselves worked up. Nothing professional about it, as you say. Unless they were pros trying to tell somebody something — that your point?"

"Right."

"Really did a J.-O.-B. on the little mother."

Vinnie was upside down, with maybe nine hundred puncture wounds in him, turning into maggot food under the kitchen counter there in his ex-wife's house.

"Who called it in?"

"His wife, er, uh, HEY!" He motioned to a detective. "Yo." He motioned for him to come over to the kitchen area.

"Tell him how you caught the call."

"Yeah. Well, it was his ex-wife. She said she'd just come in and found him. Claims she was shacked up with her latest old man in Atlantic City. We're checking it out. Vinnie's got a little yellow sheet. Little half-assed rat package."

"Maybe he ratted out the wrong dudes."

"Could be Rikla's people. I admit it don't look like no hit. Anyway, he was always trying to get made and didn't have the eggs for it, and — far as I ever heard — he just never had his shit together."

"He's got his shit together now." They laughed.

"F'r sure."

"Lynch Street people got here first. They called us. I came. You came. That's about the whole shot."

"Think they'll have anything on the street on this?"

"Naaaaaa. I doubt it."

"A payback thing. Somebody's gonna say somethin' otherwise it's all wasted. You know how the wise guys are."

"Nobody gives a shit about Vinnie. Nobody's gonna miss him. He was a schmuck. Even his ex-old lady pegged it. She said when she came home and found him gathering little white wormies and smellin', in her words "— the cop looked at a notebook — 'like ten bags of dead skunks.'" They chuckled. "It was no big surprise. She told the Lynch Street guys, 'Hell, he was lucky he lived THIS long.'"

"Quite an epitaph."

"Leech."

"Yo."

"Can we take this fucker yet?"

"NO, GODDAMMMIT YOU CAN'T TAKE THIS FUCKER YET, I done tol' y'all fourteen times. Whatsa big hurry, fi'r shit sake?"

"No hurry at all. We LIKE standing here smellin' this puke 'n' shit."

"Right. I know it's a revolutionary theory but what if we would bring latent in here and dust this scene and, you know, find the FINGERPRINTS of the dudes what did the crime. You know, like on TV?"

"Sure. Wonderful."

And that was what happened. Jackie Nails, a.k.a Jack Annelo, and Big Mike Stricoti of the Dagatina family —"alleged gunmen," as the papers worded it — had left their big guinea paw prints all over the house. It was enough to make a couple of tentative arrests and within twenty-four hours media was running neat little sidebars about the "big break in the mob slayings."

The entire unit was on hand by chance when the next "big break" took place. A lab finding nailing Annelo to one of the earlier shootings. In the best spirit of omerta he'd clammed up, and that made him look even better for the wise-guy killings. Except to Eichord.

He was prepared to believe almost anything, on one hand, and on the other his healthy skepticism had been replaced by a monumental paranoia about the case. For one thing, ever since the Ventura Boulevard hit in Studio, there had been no more EYEBALL murders. He kept thinking one of these gangland kills in St. Louis would tie to California, but it wasn't happening.

All the facts and the serious conjecture indicated solutions involving more than one perpetrator.

A: The street rumors floating back to Homicide at LAPD pointed to a couple of local punks for the Studio City job.

B: The Laclede Landing shooting had been a shooter and a wheel man at the least.

C: The two Dagatina hoods were tied solid to the Betters killing. Jackie Nails to at least one other hit.

But for all that, Floyd Streicher of the hooded eyes would not get out of his head. And Jack rubbed his eyes, sighed, and looked down at the phrase he'd been doodling:

DID I LIVE? EVIL I DID.

And in a long expulsion of air he emptied his lungs and read the sentence backward. Realizing as he did so that he had no idea what the fuck he was involved in here. And against his better judgment he took in more air and kept going.

* * *

At precisely 1430 the following Monday all hell broke loose. The CP was screaming on the phone to Victor Springer that the notorious mob lawyer Jake Rozitsky and another individual believed to be an innocent bystander had just been blown up in a gangland bombing downtown. An unprecedented number of units responded, as well as the fire department, and Eichord.

Brass balls to the walls. Media going insane. A circus of mobile units, flashing lights, roiling smoke, sirens, you name it. Two television news choppers almost got into a midair chickie fight trying to jockey for position for best shots of the burning building and the obligatory scene of cops and paramedics and firemen taking Rozitsky and the other man, thought to be a building worker, out to a waiting ambulance in body bags.

Glass came running up to Eichord hollering something at him and it was so noisy he couldn't hear.

"What?"

("MUMBLE MUMBLE") "WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

("SOMETHING") He looked like he was saying metro something. Then he made the universal sign for telephone and Eichord got it and grabbed his two-way, switching it over to the metro freq and taking the call from McTuff. It was one of the things he'd put into play on his own, and the Task Force had reached out just in time. He went over and told Springer, "Lieutenant?"

"What?"

"Come inside the car here." He motioned.

"Huh," Springer screamed.

"In HERE."

"Jesus," Vic Springer said, falling into the car. "Sounds like World War Three goin' on out here. Shit, unfuckin'-real, I can't hear any —"

"We got something, maybe," Eichord told him.

"Yeah?"

"I got a court order for a wiretap. I put it in through McTuff. Roundabout through the DAs office."

"How come you didn't ask me about it, Jack?" He looked so dyspeptic Eichord wondered if he was going to be all right and then he remembered it was just a face. "What tap? Whose phone?" He kept caving in.

"Rozitsky's." He nodded toward the smoking building where firemen were still at work putting the last of the blaze out.

"You tapped Jake Rozitsky? When was this? How come you didn't talk to me?" A basset is all Eichord kept thinking as sad eyes looked at him.

"Just a few days ago. I didn't have a chance, Lieutenant. Always somebody around or I wasn't near a telephone I could trust. Taps go two ways. I got a bad feeling about this Russo case."

"Yeah." Springer sat quietly for a second. "You're saying somebody in the unit is dirty."

"No. Not at all. Just saying — well, you have to consider all the options. The bottom line is. I had his private line tapped when he was killed."

"Umm. And?"

"I think I've got the killer's voice on tape."

Back at Twelfth and dark everybody in Chief Adler's Special Division gathered on the fourth floor as if for a wake or a quiet riot. It took a long, l-o-n-n-n-g forty-five minutes for the agent to show up with the dupe of the original.

"Go ahead," Springer told him, and the special agent threaded the tape into a playback unit.

"Okay. Uh" — he cleared his throat — "this is not going to be real great quality so we'll have to concentrate and make as little noise as possible, please, so everybody can hear this clearly. This is a dupe of the original and we lost a lot of the sound quality dubbing it but we knew you wanted to hear the content as soon as possible. We should have the real thing for you all remastered and quite audible by tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile this is all we can give you."

"All right. What it is — this is a tap made from an office bug in the law office of the decedent, but this was patched into a mobile phone which transmits through high-frequency radio waves. It's a cellular unit, like your two-ways, or paging services, things like that, but this is not off the open tap that addresses the device by harmonics, this —"

"Uh, excuse me," Eichord interrupted. "Sorry but we need to hear this, so if you will hold off on the technical stuff for later." Somebody said showtime as the agent nodded and hit Play. For five minutes all they heard was a lot of crap about the Dolphins game, and the line on the game, and the point spread. Then there was a new conversation.

Eichord listened to the somewhat poor-quality tape as the lawyer's secretary spoke with someone else's secretary, and there was a pause while the other party came on the line. One of the cops in the room said, "This is James Measure he's talkin' to."

"Yeah," a gruff voice barked.

"Mr. Measure, please stay on the line for Mr. Rozitsky."

"Yeah, awright."

"Jim-baby," a rich voice enthused.

"Jake. What's up?"

"How are ya, booby?"

"I'm awright. Not too bad."

"Listen, Jim ... I gotta talk to ya about a couple of things later, ya know?"

"Yeah."

"I had that meeting with our friend over there, and it's just what I told you. He's holding us up, but he's gonna' swing with it, so that's all there is to it we just gotta push his buttons."

"He's holding us up awright, the cocksuck."

"Yeah. That's going to have to be taken care of. We gonna get banged for some sweetener, ya' know?"

"Oh, I figured that out awready."

"He's gonna have to have some sweetener but he'll pop for us I promise ya, no problem at all. We gotta waltz him around a little first, and then he's gonna waltz us around a little, and then we're all gonna dance a little more, and finally we gonna get a bottom line, and that's the way it'll work. I mean, we'll get there it's just gonna take a dance or two."

"I don't give a fuck he gotta go with me on this thing, that's all there is to it."

"I talked to him. Look, Jim, he knows that's your country here and he's gotta go through you to do this thing, and some dues get paid both ways, he's aware of this."

"Fuckin' right it's our country here, the mother-fucker."

"So it's just getting banged for a little sweetener and dance a couple dances with the sonofabitch and that's that, emmis, but it's like a bullshit thing with him, ya know? He's gotta put you through the numbers, see, so it looks like it's all kosher, and Mr. Big Businessman, but at the end he's got his hand out. He just don't ask for the sweetener like a man, he gotta waltz us around all over the place first. But that's what you got me for. I'll dance with the cock-suck for a while and then we'll do something."

"So what's he gonna nail us on it?"

"I figure another ten dollars on it."

"Je-sus CHRIST! Whattya' fuckin' MEAN ten shit. That sonofabitch thinks we're made outta fuckin' money, fer Chrissakes? Fuck him."

"So we'll get banged for a little sweetener and that's the name of that tune. But you know, what pisses me off he can't be a man and just come out wit' it he's gotta' waltz around all over the place first and act like Honest John, see, and the slimy sonofabitch is puttin' his hand down in your pocket and telling you this and that and the other thing like he can't do this and he can't do that."

"This is bullshit. Ten large. Christ, the fuck, gonna bang me for another ten large I better see something happen pretty fuckin' fast is all I can tell ya. I ain't payin' ten dollars more for a hand job."

"I'll let you know what finally gets decided on that. But meanwhile on the other thing you had me reach out for —?"

"Yeah?"

"No problem. He's very understanding to our situation. I can absolutely fuckin' guarantee you we reach him when we want him. The only thing is it has to be handled with kid gloves. I don't want to do it myself."

"Just take care of it whatever ya' think."

"Yeah. I'll have somebody here in the office drop around and give him the envelope. That's no problem. And he's quite understanding and sympathetic. The thing is you know he says there has to be something for show. My feeling is we can expect a very smooth thing there, though."

"When we come up? What is it — three weeks?"

"Yeah, right. Jim, another thing good for us there is that he's got his friend wants that political thing. That appointment is like a fucking lifetime annuity, ya know?"

"Ya better fucking believe it. Those cocksucks don't do shit and the fucking thing pays seventy large while they sit on their asses, and they don't gotta run every couple years like them other assholes. Shit. They gotta fuckin' bird's nest on the ground."

"Abso-fuckin'-lutely. Shit, I'd take a fuckin' judgeship over there. And of course he knows you got the fix in with the Committee too, so we got no problem there whatsoever. So his friend has done all that work for the ticket, see, and we just ease him into that, we got two out of three bases covered over there."

"Goddamn right."

"Well, I'm sorry about the other but I wanted to let you know about our friend over there. I think he'll bang us for ten dollars and that'll be that, so hang tough, and I'll get back to ya when I have something concrete."

"I got something concrete for the cocksuck."

(They laugh.)

"Take care — talk to ya later."

"Awright, Jake, lemme know."

"Will do, my friend. Talk to ya soon."

"Okay. Now listen," as the voice-activated Norelco kicked back on again and Eichord heard a soft, extremely precise voice ask the secretary if Mr. Rozitsky was in.

"Who shall I say is calling, please?"

"Tell him it's Roy Cohn," the man said.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Cohen, one moment please," the woman said, missing the man's joke.

A few seconds later a laughing voice came on the line: "Jake Rozitsky."

"Hello, Mr. Rozitsky. You don't know me and my name won't be important to you, but I have some information that you're going to find very valuable with respect to a criminal case you're going to be involved in within a couple of weeks."

"Who am I talking with, please?"

"Oh, just think of me as a friend of the court. Listen, I don't want money. I just want justice. And I happen to be in a position to tell you something about a certain person that will be of great help to you in the upcoming situation."

"If you're talking about the hearing, I really can't discuss something like this over the phone and I —"

"Cut the bullshit," the voice said quietly. "I'm a friend. All you have to do is listen and judge for yourself. I don't trust this line of yours at all, for starters, and if you have half a brain you'll know what I'm talking about. If you want to hear the information I have for you, no strings attached, go downstairs to the pay telephone in your lobby. Do you know the phone I'm talking about?"

"Yeah, but that —"

"This is important. I don't have time to bullshit with you, I'm phoning that pay telephone in three minutes. If you're there to answer it, fine. If the doorman or somebody answers it, I hang up and you won't hear from me again. If I get a busy I'll dial it again in three minutes, but that's it. You've got three minutes to get downstairs." The line clicked dead before the lawyer had a chance to argue about it.

"He told his secretary he'd be back in a few minutes," the cop said to Eichord, "and that was the last thing he ever said to anybody as far as we know.

"There was about a half a pound of plastique under the pay phone. It went off approximately three minutes following this last call. Blew him right in half, took out the front windows, glass fucking everywhere, killed an innocent man —"

"Adios, Jake." another cop said.

Eichord thought about the line in Shakespeare's Henry VI. The one about "Kill all the lawyers." He rewound the tape back a little ways, listening to the cool, well-modulated, soft tones say, "Tell him it's Roy Cohn." It was a distinctive voice. The man speaking barely above a whisper, enunciating with the greatest precision, accentless and bland like an announcer but without the professional smoothness, each syllable distinct from the next. Overprecise. Confident.

"You don't know me and my name won't be important to you," the soft voice said, pronouncing each vowel so precisely.

Jack Eichord reached over and rewound it back again and tried to imagine the man's mouth as it formed the o sounds, "You don't know me and my name won't be important to you —"

"Wrong," said Eichord to the tape.

"Hey, I can tell ya one thing about that voice for sure."

"Yeah?" They looked at the cop who had spoken.

"Jackie Nails it ain't."

The thing about Rita was. Yes, you dirty old man. That WAS the thing about her. And there were other things he liked too. He liked her. He liked — hell, he LOVED the idea of liking a woman. One woman. He was nuts about liking.

It was good to be, as the previous generation had put it, "of an age." He guessed they were of an age, okay. It was an interesting age, too. No doubt about it. Even with the anxieties and the doldrums and the infrequent paranoia, there was that wonderful feeling of being comfortable in your skin that so rarely is gifted on the young. They have other things going for them, sure. But he wouldn't trade places.

Take Rita, and he certainly would. Every chance he got, thanks. She had that class you can't acquire by any shortcut. Money will definitely not buy it. It's more than style, or flair, or good breeding. It's class. Even in her wildest, hottest moments of abandon, he thought her touchingly decorous.

He knew he could talk to her of Casablanca, Sibelius' Valse Triste, Dostoyevski and Diaghilev and Della Street and Vivian Delia Chiesa, and she might know and remember. He could whisper to her of Madame de Beauvoir and Ted de Corsia and Vaughn de Leath and Demosthenes and she'd not lose her marbles. But would she remember Les Damon and Les Tremayne, Brad Runyon and Margot Lane, Olan Soule and Omar the Mystic, Jack Packard and Michael Axford, George W. Trendle and Phillips H. Lord? Would she recall the pussycat on Kilimanjaro, Moxie and Chox,

Chickory-Chick, Stan Getz' Stella? Stella Dallas? Or only Dallas . . . ? He knew, and the flood of knowing engulfed the hard consonants in a stream-of-consciousness distant sharing.

She was his salvation, first of all. The one thing that could elevate him out of the dour, drab, sordid milieu that held him in its more or less permanent grip. Rita could take him out of there in an eye blink. Just the thought of being with her, that long, flashy, red mane of silky-soft hair that framed her pale and angelic beauty, the look of her striding across a room on those killer legs of hers, it was enough to turn him completely around in a New York second. The lady made him crazy. What a fox. He especially liked her mouth and told her so as they moved forward in the moderately long line waiting to see Asphalt Jungle.

"You've got some mouth on you," he whispered to her, "you know that?"

"Yes. A lot of people I know say I've got a real mouth on me."

"Well, that too. But even that turns me on."

"Laundry lists turn you on, Binaca breath, so what else is new?"

"Waiting in lines doesn't turn me on. But I'll do anything to see Marilyn again. You two had something in common, ya know?"

"Oh, sure. I want to list all the things that Marilyn Monroe and I have in common. I'll list them in alphabetical order, okay? We're both women. She spoke English and I speak English. When she was still alive her body temperature was about ninety-eight point six and by coincidence so is mine. Well, that's pretty much the end of the list. We do have a world in common, don't we?"

"I could work on the body-temperature part if you've got a minute."

"You want me to call a cop, mister?"

"The worst thing about being close to you is that you don't get to look at you from a distance. I wish you could be with me and across the street at the same time, so I could watch you walk. If I could see you walking down the street right now on those lovely, long legs of yours . . . . " His black eyes were sparkling at her and he was speaking very softly in her ear.

"Well, kindly try to NOT jump on my bones here in the line. Dad is retired, and I'm not at all certain we can count on Winston bailing us out if we were arrested," she whispered, "for creating a public spectacle. After all, this is St. Louis, almost the Bible Belt."

"Is that right?" he whispered back, hotly.

"Also," she said, the tip of her tongue touching his ear for emphasis as she whispered, "if you keep nuzzling me like this we may not get to watch The Asphalt Jungle again, which you've probably only seen roughly twenty-seven times. I don't think I could stand something like this on my conscience."

"If you really don't want to see Marilyn and the gang we can bop on over to East St. Louis right now. There's a little neighborhood art house showing Dick Powell in Cry Danger."

"Oh, my God! Really? Can this be true?" He nodded affirmatively. "Be still, my beating heart. This is too exciting. And who is the leading lady in that one, Lillian Gish? No. Don't tell me. Just say this much. Is it a talkie?"

"Yes. Of course. It's the ultimate trailer-court movie. Seedy and sleazy just the way you like 'em."

"Good." She shook her red mane as if in pain at the thought. "Do we know each other well enough I could ask one small favor?"

"You got it, shweetheart," Bogie said. "Just whishtle."

"After we've been together for a few more months — you know, when we really start to know each other — there's something I'd like to ask you to do for me. It's kind of wild and crazy. And perhaps it isn't something you'd want to do on your own, it's so kinky. But please, keep an open mind about this. Sometime — if I'm good — could we go see a NEW movie? You know, one that's in color? With living actors?"

A long pause while Eichord considered this.

"No. Sorry." He shook his head. "You ask too much."

"Sorry! Oh, my!" She mock-winced to herself. "Bite my tongue."

"I'll take care of that," he said as the line inched forward in the direction of the stale-popcorn smell.

Hell, you never know where you'll find a clue, right?

Spain tried to remember when he'd gone to a doctor for any kind of a checkup. He was getting a feeling that he didn't like. Not every day but quite frequently he'd get this sort of dizzy sensation, this feeling like he was falling. Just the way he felt when he was about to come down with a bad cold. His sinuses were killing him for some reason. The new bed he'd bought for the house didn't feel right. Something was wrong with the mattress. He had a painful ingrown toenail he couldn't seem to do anything about. He went to the bathroom and was reluctant to look at his stool.

It was when he was in back of the small funeral home that he had that odd feeling again. The desire to kill the next person he came in contact with. He correctly analyzed it for the insanity that it was and pushed it back. He wanted a large cardboard box like coffins and refrigerators and things come in, and that is why he was there. It was for the soundproof room he'd built.

Frank Spain had experimented with convex polygons, rhomboidal parallelograms, every imaginable shape. A trapezoidal quadrilateral of two short, matching sides and a slightly longer back seemed ideal. The front of the roof would be for interrogation. The trapezoidal shape played off the weird roofline, allowing him to create a set of plausible fake walls that appeared to butt against one another. He built them as double walls, eight walls, not four, the hidden inner room — not much more than a walk-in closet — being a double-walled soundproof chamber.

The back of each wall in the office, his L-shaped storage room, and master bedroom were covered in acoustical soundpoofing tiles, which he'd cleared with the landlord long before he made a deal to rent the place.

The small space between each pair of walls was filled with egg crates, or would be as soon as he found his large sheets of cardboard to hold them just so. Then the inner walls were covered in carpet remnants. There are few more effective sound baffles.

There was no cardboard in back of Lane-Freeman's, a small, middle-class funeral establishment. He walked up and tried the back door. Unlocked. He walked in. It was an empty anteroom of some kind. He walked in, turned to the left, and went through a door marked PRIVATE. It was a preparation room. Spain smiled. The feeling was very strong. What if someone who looked a little like Gaetano Ciprioni would suddenly show his ugly face in the door.

Spain quickly went over to a metal table next to a sink and picked up a sharp instrument which he held by his side as he walked out of the building. No one had seen him. The feeling passed and he went on to another establishment and found his sheets of cardboard, which he could barely squeeze into the back seat of the large vehicle.

Back in his special home he finished the egg-crate sound block and walled off the make-do baffles with the cardboard, creating both a double dead-chamber and an effective sound-stopper. The center of the small, concealed room was over a deep, drainage ditch that had been the deciding factor in the choice of rentals. What the landlord didn't know was that his new tenant had enclosed a small section of this ditch, now a pit of lye, and sawed through the floor of the home, making the pit accessible from inside the house.

In the past weeks Spain had been collecting makeshift torture tools as the spirit moved him. And in a corner of the small "interrogation room" was a box of shackles, pliers, knives, razors, hooks, picks, pincers, things made to pierce and rip and torment and mutilate and eviscerate. On the back wall there was a shelf of deadly chemicals and in the corner some saws and an oxyacetylene torch.

It was just a very nice, middle-to-upper-middle-class brick three bedroom from the front. Unusual only for the isolated location and the busy roofline. And now Spain's custom interior work. He left the house, flipping on his security system — can't have burglars breaking in — and got in the car.

He dialed his cutout from a pay phone and heard some good news. "Glad you called," she told him. "A Mr. Hitter called twice for you. He said he'd be at this number at the designated time. Just touch base as soon as you could. He wanted me to say it just like that. At the designated time. Just touch base as soon as you could."

"Okay." Spain chuckled warmly. "You make that sound like a code." They both laughed. "He's a character."

"Well, he was explicit about the message. He wanted it just like that, so .... "

"Fine. You did good. He's just an oddball. Thinks his way is the only way, you know." She mmmmed and he ended the call but with the nagging feeling of paranoia he was starting to get careless. The idiot didn't have to make a big production about the fucking time. All that had been prearranged to avoid just that sort of suspicious-sounding bullshit. He'd have to cut his secretary loose soon, or better yet give her more routine, normal work. These weird calls, sending her across to say things to a stranger in a car . . . these were things she might remember. Five thousand dollars cash and the son of a bitch couldn't handle a simple phone message. He dialed a pay telephone impatiently.

"Yeah."

"Is this Mr. Hitter?"

"Okay. I found him. This heeb he uses posted for him and he's hidin' out in a place the family owns out at the lake." He gave Spain an address and directions. "He's got one guy inside, one guy outside. Outside guy is in car. I think the guy inside's a fag." He giggled. "Anyway, that's it. Anything else I can do for ya."

"That's got it. Nice work."

"Call me anytime."

"Will do." Fucking idiot. They broke off.

Spain went back to the house and put on a leather coat, got a hat, some other things. Drove out to Lake St. Charles.

The Park Avenue was sitting about a hundred and fifty yards from the front door. Visible from the house and to passing traffic. It was't ideal but he'd handle it.

He walked up in plain sight, noticing the guy move slightly. Probably had his hand around a piece.

"Yeah," the man in the car grunted, putting a question mark on the end of it.

"Sir, please place both your hands on the steering wheel," he said, letting the leather ID case flop open. A hunk of fancy enamelwork and gold and a well-done laminated photo card flashed into view. "You have the right —"

"Ay, what the fuck is this shit?" the guy said, but bringing his other hand up empty on the wheel. "Who'd —"

"— to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney." He brought the silenced pistol up and shot the man in the temple. A bright fountain of hot, red blood gushed out of the head as he fell to the right. "You have the right to a mortician." Spain kept talking into the car as he slid the piece back in a pocket. "If you wish a mortician but cannot afford one . . . . " He stopped and got back in the car and drove up to the front door. He got out and rang the buzzer.

A thin, pale man with dirty blond hair answered the door. "Yes?"

"Your name?" The shield blinked out again.

"MY name?"

"Yes, sir. State your name please."

"My name is Dorn."

"Sir, we have a search warrant to inspect these premises in relation to a federal investigation." He was moving past the man as he spoke, "Well, just one minute here .... And he shot the man in the face moving quickly into the room even before the man dropped, holding the piece on Kriegal, a nice firm double-handed hold like in the movies.

"Blue," he said, "you're under arrest, asswipe. And here come d' judge." He laughed, feeling good for the first time all day.

And then he saw the pictures on the walls.

He thought for a moment it was a hallucination. Those weren't really pictures of little kids in each other's arms and in the embraces and oh my God in the embraces of adults and in the positions and in the savage postures and in the bound and screaming punishments and in the awful, ah, the vileness of it, in the commission of obscene acts frozen by a camera, professionally mounted and matted and framed under glass.

He whispered to the stocky, balding man seated on the long sofa, "I'd like to slice that filthy head off and shit down your neck hole, you —" He really couldn't think of anything foul enough to call him. He'd run out of words. He moved forward and kicked the man in the stomach, being very careful, kicking him as precisely as he could so as not to allow his emotions to run unchecked. He knew if he let loose now it'd all be over in thirty seconds, and that would be a shame. That would defeat everything he'd been working for. The whole point was to make the scum crawl. To drag their tortures out and turn some of the suffering back around in their direction.

The one picture of the two little girls kept nagging at him, and against his judgment he let himself steal another glance at it. One little child about nine, ten years old, doing something to another one. The one on the receiving end reminded him of Tiff in a favorite scrapbook shot, and just for a few seconds his rage bubbled over beyond the rim of control and he kicked Blue Kriegal about twenty times as hard as he could. He had to get him out of there or he'd waste him. Spain didn't even bind his hands. He had such disdain for him he just went out and popped the trunk, came back and rolled the unconscious body onto a small throw rug and dragged Kriegal out past the body of his slain companion, and unceremoniously horsed the dead-weight into the car.

William Kriegal awoke in darkness and in intense pain and fright, but then the trauma took him under and he woke up much later with that choking sensation you get from smelling salts, but when he tried to pull his face away from the gagging spirits he could not move.

"Aaaaaaaaaa, pleeeeease," he begged the man snarling into his face.

"Good morning. Did you sleep well?" He capped the small bottle.

"Jesus, buddy, I'll give you anything please don't —"

"Blue, Blue, BLUE, shut your asshole a second. My name is Frank Spain. Did you ever hear of me?" he asked pleasantly.

"Uh —" The man's brain was going a mile a minute. Where the fuck was he and how was he going to get out of this one?

"You're not feeling so hot, right?"

"Huh uh." He felt like he was going to go under again.

The man said, "I'm going to give you something to make you feel better, okay? My name's Frank Spain. But you can call me Mr. Spanhower. Say, Hello, Mr. Spanhower."

"'Lo, Mr. Spanhower."

"Good."

"Please, Mr. Span —"

"Now, Blue. See what I've got for you. Vitamins," he said brightly. "This'll put some lead in your pencil." Kriegal flinched when he saw the hypodermic needle.

"Oh, hey — Blue, don't sweat this. This is just something to get you feeling in the pink again." He shot a minute amount of fluid into the air, "Don't want to shoot an air bubble into your bloodstream and kill you, for heaven's sake." Spain deftly found a vein in Kriegal's meaty arm and plunged the spike in.

"Mmmm." The man made an involuntary fear noise as Spain depressed the syringe.

"Yes. I understand. Blue. Nothing is quite as potent as tetrodotoxin. Especially this little mix. Hot as the Orinoco Basin, baby. Quirky as a Shuar poultice. Heavy-duty as voooooooodooooooooooooo," he said, playing with the man.

"Please, listen mister, I don't know how come you're doin this, but I got over two hundred thousand in a —"

Spain shut him up by simply shoving his palm over the man's mouth. "Hmm-ummm. No talking. Just take it easy. You're going to need all your strength. Don't guess you're hip to brugmansia? Datura? Zombie's cucumber? Jeez, Blue, what am I going to do with you? Ain't you gotcher ethnobotani-cal, ophiological shit together? Well? Speak up, man. Cat got your tongue?"

"Jesus. Please."

"Oh, relax. I was just jivin' witcha' about the zombie stuff. That's just plain old gasoline. But Blue, I didn't scrimp. It's PREMIUM. Does it smart a little, Blue?" Suddenly he lost the grip on his control and started screaming "DIE DIE DIE YOU PIECE OF vile shit!" He was screaming into the face of the man as he picked up the stolen trocar, which is a sharp thing embalmers use to insert a cannula into the torso of a cadaver to drain the body cavity, and drove it again and again into the living, screaming body of Blue Kriegal.

"I had all these plans for us, Blue," he sighed, calming down. "But I don't think we're going to be able to keep you around long enough to turn you into a zombie, damn it. I believe you're fucking dead. Blue. What do you say — eh?" His voice was loud in the small enclosure, as he watched the lye down in the drainage culvert take the dark, red whirlpool. He stood there for a long time, staring with cold eyes, transfixed, as if awaiting further word from the high oracle.

And that night in his sleep, Anubis, jackal-headed god of the ancients. Protector of Graveyards, presided over the Weighing of the Heart at the Last Judgment Rites.

The distinguished-looking man locked his study door and walked over and sat down behind the massive desk. He bent over and did something to one of the legs and the front of what appeared to be the desk leg came off in his hand. He reached in and took out an instrument with red and black telephone receivers on it. He pressed a button, a light came on, and he placed the red phone in the central cradle section and picked up the black phone and dialed.

"Yeah .... I wanna order a sit-down. The whole council. Emergency session." He barked a hard response back into the phone. "I know that, for fucking shit's sake. I'm not an idiot. Listen. All the dons. I don't care if it's fucking Apalachin all over again I want reps from ALL the fuckin' families. We got a war on our hands and it ain't what everybody thinks. I know who's behind all this shit. It could only be one man." He let air out in a sigh of anger and frustration.

"Now listen. Here's what I want. I want you to get a crew . . . No, a crew, shit, I want a fuckin' PLATOON of soldiers. I'm going to give you an address in Ladue, Missouri ..."

St. Louis Mob Figure Charged In Child-abuse Case Missing St. Louis, Mo. Missouri News Service Wire, Eichord read, skipping M08-44-29173301 and reading,

A one-time foster parent for the Missouri Division of Family Services, recently targeted in a federal investigation of St. Louis area mob activities, was charged with abuse in two counties after police found what was described as "thousands of porno photos and films involving children." The evidence was confiscated at his home in Jefferson County.

William "Blue" Kriegal, 41, of the 12000 block of DeSoto, was charged Tuesday with six felony counts of child abuse in Warren County, and two counts in Jefferson County. He was released after posting $75,000 bond, authorities said, and is believed to have fled.

Police have been searching for Kriegal since Wednesday, and a warrant has been issued for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Kriegal's family declined all comment.

Kriegal was targeted as a "principal suspect" in a federal investigation centering on the alleged "crime family" of Salvatore Dagatina and other unnamed individuals who are believed by authorities to control the child-pornography and narcotics rackets in the Midwest, according to Assistant Jefferson County Prosecutor Kenneth Wales.

"We're still developing pictures, and establishing venue, in addition to statutes of limitations," Wales said at the time of the child-abuse charges, "as Missouri has a three-year limit for prosecuting this type of a case."

Kriegal was a certified foster parent for the Division of Family Services at one time, and was responsible for the care of several children ranging in age from nine to thirteen in the Columbia, Missouri, area, according to Melinda Zook, the agency's deputy director. She refused to discuss Kriegal's record as a foster parent.

Zook said that prospective foster parents were always investigated as thoroughly as possible but she conceded to reporters that "picking good foster-parent homes is an inexact science."

Authorities believe that Kriegal is involved in the production and distribution of so-called "snuff" films, pornographic films in which actual scenes of beatings, torture, and murder are also seen. Kriegal is believed by authorities to have been responsible for films in which children were tortured and killed, according to a source in the Jefferson County Prosecutor's office.

He read the words aloud to himself, and even though they were words meant to be read silently, to speak them gave them impact.

Eichord was on trail now. He had the voice. And now he had a hint. Something nudging him. This was what he lived for. His inviolable work ethic: the elemental foundation, catharsis, curative, analeptic. The restorative and stimulant to his soul as he hunted through the sewers and putrefaction and corruption and evil. And reading the words chilled him as he felt the familiar vectors beginning to cross. He was out there somewhere. Waiting to kill again. A death master. And now there was a voice. And a pattern. And vectors crossing.

He knew his next move for once. He should have done it earlier when he picked up on the pattern of the kills. Eichord no longer knew or cared if the Floyd Streicher SEE NO EVIL wise guy was involved in this. He got Bud Leech and got him away from the Homicide Bureau.

Leech was sensitive to the maneuver and wanted to know, "How come you don't wanna talk up there?" gesturing to the cop shop. "Come on," Eichord said. "Let's walk."

"You worded about a rocking bug?"

"Forget about that. I got something, Bud."

"Yeah?"

"I think so," he said. And he told him what he needed. About the surveillance he wanted.

"Hell, let's put the damn van on it."

"No way," he said. A decision he'd immediately regret. "I want this just you and me, podnah. Let's just you 'n' me handle it."

"Shit, okay," the big man said with a shrug, "you got it." Implicit in the shrug was a question. You think the Special Division is dirty.

Eichord just said, "I just want to be careful. VERY careful. This is . . . . Well, hell, I don't know WHAT it is. But it's something more than warring gang factions." He didn't say it to Leech but he thought, SUPERKILLER.

Two days later a "professionally made bomb containing a large quantity of high explosive" blew up the stretch limo in which one of the sons of "Jimmie the Hook" Russo, Phillie Russo, was riding with his chauffeur/bodyguard, Bugs DeVintro. Homicide, Intelligence, and Arson rolled on it, as did Eichord, and it gave him his first close look inside the St. Louis mob.

He was at the crime scene and a massive, Italian-looking man with swarthy features and a face that looked like the dark side of the moon came up to him and said, "You d' one from d' Tass Force?"

"Yep."

He handed him a note with a phone number on it. "Mrs. Russo wan' you to call her," he thought the man said.

"Mrs. Russo? Rosemarie Russo?"

"MISS Russo. Angelina. You call her?" Eichord nodded. "Soon as you can, please. T'anks."

He went to the nearest phone and dialed.

A woman answered it on the second ring. "Yeah."

"Hello, this is Jack Eichord calling for Angelina Russo, please."

"Yeah, I know. I'm her. I'm Angelina. C'n you come over here to d' house?"

"Sure can. Right now?"

"Yeah, awright. Soon as you can, okay?"

She told him where she lived, not realizing he'd been there first thing when he hit St. Louis and couldn't get an audience with the Russos, and he thanked her and headed across town.

He didn't have any trouble finding his way to the Russo house again. He parked and went up to the door and knocked. He rang the doorbell. Knocked again. Inside a baleful, huge bodyguard was saying to his charge, "Miss Russo, you makin' a mistake, please don't talk to no coppers."

"Let him in, Johnny."

"If Jimmie were here, he —"

She cut him off with a look. "Right. If Jimmie were here you wouldn't question what I asked you to do. Now let him in, please."

He turned and opened the door. Johnny had been with the family nearly as long as she'd been on earth. He was like family himself, but he still called her Miss Russo out of respect. She knew what was going through his mind for him to talk to her in that tone. She didn't care. Nothing mattered anymore. Just stop the killing.

"Jack Eichord, Miss Russo." He handed her one of the Special Homicide Division cards. "I got your note." The huge bodyguard eyed him like he'd like to string him up but he backed out of the large room and shut the door quietly behind him.

"Sit down please. And I appreciate you comin' here."

"I've been here before but I never got to speak with you."

"I had to talk to someone. The police."

"All right."

"I —" She took a very deep breath and her body sagged visibly, as if she was going to collapse. For a second he almost thought he should go over there across the room where she was sitting, be next to her if she fainted, and then she straightened up with another breath and said without preamble of any kind,

"I'm afraid for my mother."

"Oh?"

"And myself. Why not say the truth, right? I'm afraid whoever is doing this will want us, too. My brother and I were very close. I heard things." She looked at him with reddened eyes. "He thought it was somebody outside the family." Eichord didn't say anything, waiting. She coughed. "Somebody tryin' to make it look like there was a power struggle . . . inside the family. You understand what I'm saying?"

He nodded. "Did your brother have any idea who was behind the killings?"

"No. He didn't. Look — I'm even talkin' to you like this — I'm sayin' things I could be put under for. I would never rat out anybody in da family for any reason. You can do nothing with what I give you. If you say I told you this I'll deny it. If you try to use it I'll go down. You're gonna' be sentencing me if you tell someone else. You understand?"

He inclined his head and kept silent.

"I won't ask for your word because I don't know you. I don't know if you are a man who takes his word seriously. But if you tell anybody you put me under. They'll clip me for sure. Am I getting through to you?"

He nodded again. Angelina Russo had a voice that was used to issuing orders. "Go ahead," he encouraged her.

"There is a council, board, call it what you want, there is this council that meets in New York with the big families. These men govern the society. Their word is the absolute law. Not your law. The law. What we live by. You understand when we meet — as amico nostro? To be with us, with the thing of ours, is to imply honor that you can trust to the death. But it is a joke. The society, the friends of ours, this has no more meaning than a society of you coppers. Like you police, we are all the same. There is only a handful you can trust.

"So these men they must protect the family. Whenever there is power and money there are always others who want it all for themselves, and our family, like yours, exists because of greed. It is these men who have a few trusted workers within the most secret part of the society. Nobody knows who these men are who work for the capos of the families. Not even the lieutenants who run the top crews. They work in secret.

"Phillie knew that the killing was coming from outside. He was sure of it."

For a while Eichord thought she was going to say more but whatever she had been about to say she had changed her mind. He read it first in the eyes, which went absolutely blank, and next in the body language, and he felt it in the atmosphere as she metamorphosed in that heartbeat, changing back into the Mafia girl in front of him. Within that second she'd completely shut him out of it, come to the edge and almost almost opened the door for him and then, no, the years of habit and influence restored the adversarial climate in which such a woman existed. And he knew he was unwanted here and that any more conversation would be a waste of his time as well as hers, and he got up and left, letting himself out, hearing the solid door slam behind him, shut out of it by tough guinea anthropophagy.

As Eichord got in the car and left, a pair of eyes watched him from across the street through expensive surveillance equipment. They were sometimes greenish-blue in light, sometimes slate-gray, and cold as gunmetal. The eyes of a madman, a professional watcher, glad the girl was still inside.

These mad eyes did not see the girl as a grief-stricken sister and daughter. He, the silent watcher, was more interested in her living brother, Joe Russo. He was watching her because she was the sister of one Joseph Russo, eldest son of Jimmie the Hook, currently serving a fifteen-year sentence for second-degree murder. He was watching Angelina because she was his ticket to Joey Russo, a convicted murderer doing hard time in the same prison as the old man — Salvatore Dagatina.

But above, to the left, and behind him, there was another pair of eyes. Someone was watching the watcher. And when Frank Spain left the premises. Bud Leech of St. Louis Intelligence was tailing him.

Back inside the cop shop the word was that the mob had hit the streets in force. They were tearing up the city but in a way none of the coppers had seen before. Not faction infighting but a cooperative effort. As if all the brotherhoods had banded together and put out a contract on somebody. People who'd been feueding since the days of Tony Gee were suddenly spotted on the streets together. The mob was looking for somebody and the cops were asking each other, "What the fuck is going on?"

Which is precisely the question Eichord wanted to ask Bud Leech when he showed up with a shit-eating look on his face and the bad news that'd he'd LOST his surveillance target. Jack looked up at the huge man and said, "Tell me you're shitting me."

"Yeah, well, I wish I was. I'm sorry, man." Leech was so contrite Eichord would have laughed if he hadn't been so fucking pissed.

"How did it happen?"

"These fucking imbeciles . . . . " He gestured out toward the traffic. "Ah, why make excuses? I just fucked the duck. I was playing it by the book. Changing lanes. Staying back real good 'n' that. This fucking semi comes barreling out of nowhere, I'm in the middle lane, old mom and pop on the left in the passing lane and the fuckin' truck was gonna hit the goddamn car if I didn't get over, I hadda tap the brakes. The motherfucker cuts in,- by the time I can get around the dude on the right he's fuckin' gone."

"What'd he look like?" Eichord said quietly.

"Shit, Jack" — he shook his head —"I never got any kind of look at his face. Ordinary build. Our age, maybe a little younger. Dressed real plain."

"And of course you checked on the tags and it was on the hot sheet, right?"

Leech nodded. "I'm sorry, babe. What can I say?"

"It happens. Fuck it."

"Want me to put the van out there on the house?"

"No," Eichord said. Another decision he'd regret.

BeBop Rutledge was about to get into his wonderful phoneman swindle and he figured it had to be not a penny less than four hundred dollars. He could get DOWN with four bills you can take that shit to the bank. BeBop snapped his fingers, jiving, gettin' it on with his bad self, diddy-bopping down the street, scattin' along and feelin' fine. BeBop Rutledge was not a black jazz musician. He was a very white, Anglo-Saxophonic person of your WASP-persuasion-type race. He was twenty-three, and he liked to smoke a little dope now and then, just some hash or whatever, and maybe snort some blow once in a while but nothing serious.

He was coming up on a fucking totally bogus Possession with Intent to Distribute in a few weeks and he had to come up with something. He thought about taking the four hundred dollars he was going to scam the phone operation for and head out West, but then u.S. Magistrate Wilma Smith was such a hard-bark old bitch she would definitely kick a hole in his ass the size of a fucking headlight if he split. All he needed was a federal fugitive warrant on top of that other Possession bullshit. BeBop wasn't going to let it bring him down.

The Possession thing was a total circle jerk. A guy he knew had come by BeBop's house with about two pounds of white powder in a plastic bag, it coulda been Comet or any damn thing in there, granulated Domino sugar — shit, what did he know, right? And the dude goes. Hey, BeBop, say hey, hold this for me an' I'll give you a trey. Shit, why not? What's a friend for? And then first thing you know Rabbit, which is his name. Rabbit's Foot, he boogies and these cops come pounding on the door 'n' shit, and they come in and find his stash, and there's this bag and he didn't know there was fucking two pounds of COCAINE in there. Damn. What a surprise, right? And then he's gotta draw Wilma Smith, her fucking ballbreaking honor the judgeship, and she just loves to step on BeBop's stones anyway, so first she sets a detention hearing and he has to make the fucking national debt in bail, and now she's gonna' try to slam him down for hard time on this absolutely bogus Possession with Intent to Distrib.

But he refused to allow this gloomy horizon to bum him out. He might just take that four hundred and get straight. Do himself a thing, you know. And it all fell together so beautiful for him, see, there he is bopping down the street when he sees this dude put a move on this other dude.

He was just about to phone The Man with a kind of bullshit thing about some fags who were into some B & E that he'd heard about, just a nothing little thing to lay some groundwork for the Possession number until he could come up with something for real, and he sees this shit. BeBop goes, "Oh, WOW!" and "Check it OUT!" when he eyeballs this one dude grab this other dude and kind of like shove him into the EGA theater. The EGA has been closed since the Last Supper, but like he sees them bop right on in there and he figures he'll see what's goin' down. Who ever knows, right?

And he pushes on in there and he can see the dudes have taken a bolt cutter or something to the big, thick chain that holds padlocks on the doors on each side of the EGA box office. And it's darker than the inside of Bessie Mae's pussy but he eases on in real quiet. Where the fuck is everybody? And he hears this mumbling shit coming from inside, and he moves on ahead, just about pissing his britches he's so scared.

The EGA — which was called the REGAL but over a period of time it lost its R and its L, and so everybody just called it EGA — it was gonna be torn down to put in another fucking condo or whatever, and it had been just this little ma-and-pa theater about a hundred years ago, and it held tops maybe 150 dudes in there go in see a fucking cowboy double feature. Lash Larue Whips It Out, one of them pictures, and BeBop eases on around so he can see the naps.

Two dudes down frost in the dark, like they got good seats you know, right in the middle, and he can barely see 'em from a little EXIT light thing over on the side, and the one dude says something and this other guy he goes, "I want you to meet Mary Pat Gardner" — I think the name he said was, or maybe Mary Pat Garner. Something like that.

"Say hello Mary Pat," he tells this other dude. And the other one goes. Yeah, cool, "Hello, Mary Pat AAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHH!" And he screams like he just got a tit in the wringer, you know.

And it's quiet then and the first dude says, "The bitch was real thirsty," or some shit like mat, and he raises something that looked like a knife and sticks the other one again but there's no sound and, man, I just about shit my pants, BeBop tells The Man.

"That's when I phoned you, man. You better get out here right away. And bring a fucking ambulance, man. This ain't no wet dream either, my man. I'm givin' you a fuckin' MURDER ONE here." And he was just starting in about the bogus Possession thing and how Her Honor U.S. Magistrate Wilma Fucking Smith was planning to put his stones in her pliers again and send him away to Springfield or somewhere and he'd come out in a couple of years with an asshole like a cannonball when the ungrateful fuckin' cop hangs up on him.

Which is how BeBop Rutledge of East Alton, Illinois, and parts unkown, got to make the acquaintance of a cop named Jack Eichord. And which is how BeBop had his day ruined, and his four-hundred-dollar scam fucked over, but which is also how he got his main man to promise he'd talk to Magistrate Smith, which was worth four hundred except for the fact that he probably wouldn't be able to sleep for a week.

Eichord played the tape and BeBop said. Yeah, that's the dude that knifed the other one. Same voice for sure. And he asked was this guy twenty-five, thirty years old? And BeBop told him. No, this is an old guy. About your age, he said. Endearing himself to Jack in the process.

And after the evidence crew and the ME and everybody cleared out and the inside of the EGA was back in the black, Eichord sat in one of the ratty seats (special this week, kids, free gum under every seat) and looked up at the darkened screen letting it all wash over him.

He sat there for along time, free-associating, thinking about the madman who was killing, trying to make it take a shape, his mind taking great leaps, suddenly refocusing without logical connectives, making wild ellipses, meaningless non sequiturs, random ramblings. And he began talking quietly to himself as he waited for Weyland the artist to finish with the snitch who might have seen enough to give them something, but he wasn't counting on it.

He mumbled to himself in a whisper, maundering like some nutbasket who'd lived alone too long, which in fact he probably had. Testing, theorizing, probing, bullshitting, trying to get some kind of a handle on all the sudden deaths.

Sitting there in the pitch black of the musty, crumbling dream factory where another innocent victim's blood had just stained one of the faded seats a sickening incarnadine. Another human being murdered by a madman, and he looked for the commonality that wasn't there, and chewed it all over again.

He'd go back and take a look at the backgrounds of the doorman in the Schindler Building and this latest victim, an agency art director who was getting a tag tied around his toe. Another innocent man dead. One more piece of a puzzle that wouldn't fit. But now, at least, he had a lone watcher at the Russo house, and a lone killer here.

It was one man. A madman. Acting alone.

* * *

He was still talking to himself the next morning in the squad room but soundlessly, running it all over in his head as he doodled aimlessly, letting the swirl of the cop-shop talk eddy and flow over him as he doodled and meditated and chewed his cud.

"No, ma'am," he could hear T. J. Monahan telling some woman on the phone. "You gotta go to the District of Occurrence on that. You need to call the LAPD or if that's in the county it might be like the East L.A. substation, okay?" L.A. Christ! He couldn't get away from the fucking place.

" — had 'em by six points but I wouldn't give you a nickel for that worthless, no good —"

" — know those projects out there and I guarantee there's a bunch of hypes living out there who don't do anything but steal credit cards for —"

" — just as soon go to Vegas and drop it all on Red and let 'er fly, if —"

" — fruit hustler working Tower Grove we think he tailed the boy in Carondelet Park last —"

"Jack," Lt. Springer said, snapping Eichord out of his reverie, "can you come on in my office?" And they head toward the end of the hall. Springer picking up bodies as they went. He had Glass, Leech, Skully, Monahan, a couple of the others from the unit in there with them.

"Look," Springer said to him, "none of us can find our ass with both hands on this thing. We've got the lab report on the weapon that did Mr. Cooper yesterday. We got a dorky eyewitness jammed up on a dope bust. We got a half-assed Identikit sketch that could be my brother-in-law. Jack, you're the serial-murder expert here. What the hell are we lookin' at?"

"I wish I could tell you something." Eichord shrugged. "But I'm in the dark with this too. I can't make a connection between the two civilian stab-bings and the gang murders — but you know how it is with hunches, I think they're connected."

"You can't make a connection," Richard Glass said, "because there isn't any, Jack. Bet on it. Two different perps. Apples and oranges."

"Maybe," he breathed deeply, "but I don't think so."

"What's your intuition on the thing. Jack? You say you have a hunch. Hell. Let's hear it," Springer said.

"A hunch is all it is. Nothing more. Nothin' solid at all. I can tell you what I'm afraid it is and can't even give you one firm indication of why I feel this way." Nobody spoke so he went ahead. "I discount the Rutledge ID. Bud, you got a space cadet," he said, smiling. They laughed. "You got BeBop. A flaky snitch headed for the joint behind a coke bust. He wants to sing our song. So even with him ID-ing the voice on the Rozitsky tape I'm afraid we don't have anything.

"But" — he tilted his head as if it suddenly weighed too much — "on a visceral level I think it's the same perp, and if it is, we're looking at something pretty frightening. I've never come up against anything like it before.

"You got your psychopath, your assassin or hit man who will have an organized mind, and a psychotic: somebody who is disorganized in his kill pattern. The first guy — sometimes above average in smarts. Plans what he does. The second perp has psychoses that cause him to murder at random. The psychopath knows the difference between right and wrong and he has a motive for what he does. If he kills it may be emotionless and carefully planned in execution. The psychotic on the other hand, he or she kills according to mood, the traditional crime of passion, the unplotted and sometimes motiveless random kill.

"As you know, the main way we catch psychotics is by the murder weapon which they often will keep in their possession or leave at the scene of the homicide. The psychopath of course carefully destroys the murder weapon or he hides it. In a psychotic we have to look at what the perp does to the victim before he kills them. Does he tell them to say hello to Mary Garner or whatever? In other words if these killings are somehow interconnected, and I feel like they may be, we're looking at a perp who is BOTH a psychopathic killer and a psychotic looney. A professional assassin of some kind such as a trained mercenary or a hit man who is also, simultaneously, going out of control and killing people at random. We're looking at a hybrid killer, in my opinion."

"Jeeezus," somebody said as the phone on Springer's desk rang.

"Lieutenant Springer."

"Right." He hung up and jumped to his feet, moving. "Let's go. He just firebombed Measure. Four dead." They all rushed for the door in a cop logjam, Leech and Eichord rode with Vic Springer and a detective sergeant named Thompson.

Homicide and Arson, Intelligence, ET, all screaming down Missouri Avenue in the River North area behind Fire. Redballs and light bars flashing, sirens screaming past the condos and rehabs, chic boutiques and galleries, plant-choked eateries and ferny bars on the way to the Measure house.

"What the fuck." People milling around. Guys getting pissed at one another. Some signals had got crossed and it hadn't been a firebombing, after all.

"Where's the fire?" somebody said.

"Fuck you," somebody replied.

There were four dead inside. And one they didn't know about yet. Spain had hit James Measure, Gino Sclaffani, Edward Sidenfadden a.k.a. Eddie Sides, and Tony Alba. All deader than last year's Christmas trees.

"Holy shit."

"Man, they look like they been used for targets at a firing range."

"Unreal."

"Whatya got?"

"It was a fire in the other room, is all. One of these things caught the drapes on fire. Little smoke. No problem."

It looked like some sort of a gas canister.

"Lieutenant, here's another one." He showed him another of the canisters.

"Must be how he took 'em down. If it was gas I don't smell any trace of it." He glanced at a man examining one of the bodies. "Any idea how long, Doc?"

"Not really." Wonderful. "An hour, two hours, maybe longer. I ain't what-sisname on TV f'r chris-sakes."

"What'ya think? An Oozey?" he pronounced it. "Or an Ingram? Something?"

"Shit. Hadda be. Probably something like an Uzi. He gathered up the mags but he left all the brass. Why the rock would he do that?"

"Because the son of a bitch is a whacko. Fucking looney tunes, that's why."

"Coulda been a belt-fed weapon," somebody offered. "That'd explain why there aren't any magazines, only brass shells, eh?"

"Wonderful," Springer said.

"He got in here somehow. Or got somebody else in here. Or two of 'em got in here somehow. And they put 'em under with the gas and then he and his partner made meat loaf out of them with submachine guns. No?"

"Why not?"

"Jack?"

"Vic?"

"It's a mess, huh?"

"Shit." A hybrid killer. Some kind of superfly mother.

What they didn't know yet was how the hit team or hit man made his entrance. Measure's pad was supposed to be a fortress. But they got in somehow. Or he got in. They could scarcely believe one man could have brought about all this slaughter. It was a mess, all right.

They didn't know about Lowenstein yet.

Ben Lowenstein, a slickie from Narcross, Georgia — Spain used him for the door key. Got him alone and took him home to the interrogation room in his house and worked on him for a few minutes and he gave him a way in. Told him about a boy who would do anything for money. And Spain got a mule to take the gas bombs inside. It cost him five thousand but it was worth it to nail Measure. When Spain was through with Lowenstein he put him down in the culvert in Treflan cans. A right leg and torso here. An arm, head, and leg there. You could say Lowenstein was laid off permanently. He got the ax. With severance.

There was nothing at the crime scene but the gas cans and lots of spent brass. Brass and gas. And gangster blood. There was one hell of a lot of that. No fingerprints that didn't check out. Nobody saw anything, as usual. Nobody heard anything, until a neighbor saw the smoke from the drapes. Zero. And these were not the GSA, these were hard core, made Mafs. Experienced wise guys and he — or they — took 'em like they were asleep. If this was a single man, crazy or not he was very, very good.

Eichord drove around, wanting to call Rita and not wanting to wish himself on anyone that sweet in the condition he was in. The idea of a couple of beers sounding pretty marvelous. Jack was neither brilliantly deductive nor was he even extraordinarily ratiocinative. The process of exact thinking, the mastery of reasoned train of thought, the Holmesian modes of deduction, all eluded him.

What it was, instead, was his ability to distill and extract the essence of a thing that made him so relentless a bringer-forth of the coldest trail or the faintest clues. However dissimilar, he was a pro at educing the latent commonalities when there appeared to be none.

He could evoke the forgotten images, elicit carefully guarded responses, extract the buried nuggets of data, extort the best-kept secrets. Eichord was superb when it came to extrapolating the unknown, excavating the buried, exculpating the innocent, extricating, exonerating, extirpating, and eliminating, and don't mess with Mister In-between.

He called it by a simpler name. To Eichord it was — vibes. His was a critical mission in the holy war of Good vs. Evil and it was the mission that made his work autotelic and sancrosanct. He plodded down the center, absorbing, listening, soaking it all in, watching. And he never stopped working. Not completely. Except with Rita. That was his one time to let it all fall apart and cleanse his mind in the soft, clean, happy, and carefree music of their relationship.

He was drawn to a phone like a magnet and he called her and just the sound of her voice on the phone lifted the load from his shoulders and he couldn't wait to see her again. And that night his blue funk dissipated and for a short time he was able to forget the sick, violent world of murder and madness and lose himself in her.

She was his music and he soloed magnificently, blowing hot, unashamed jazz licks. Triple-tonguing the instrument. Playing riffs he never thought possible. His embouchure so flawless the mere touch of his lips made her come to life beneath him. Nice 'n' easy and then penthouse-wild and finally jail-house jam. Kissing the delicate hollow of the throat, the edible declivity of the lower tip, the back of the knees, above her metatarsal arch, the delicate ligatures; tactile symphony of smokin' hot, mouth marmalade. And then easing out in a dreamy coda and back for a steaming, cookin' finish to blow minds, loving each other with the loose insouciant ease of soulmates.

And they loved it. It had never been better between them. And after a long time Rita turned and whispered, "Oh, boy? The memsahib would like to fool around with the natives again? Speak to me, gun-bearer."

But he was gone.

The mob had hit Spain's home in Ladue and gone through it like a cyclone. Leveled it. Buddy Blackburn's live-in lady had come home from Walmart's and felt something clamp over her mouth and suddenly she was in an awful world of danger and pain.

"We want Frank . . . Spain . . . understand?" It was the softness of the voice. The mock gentleness of the swarthy, scarred man who held her face cupped in one of his huge hands. Other men were holding her arms behind her.

"I don't —" Her face was being crushed by a grip of steel.

"No. You . . . ain't . . . listening. You say I don't again I give you to Shake. He likes to hurt women. Where . . . is . . . Frank?"

She blinked back tears and thought carefully. These men were going to kill her. She tried to talk and remembered she hadn't breathed in a while and took in a big gulp of air and gasped as she sobbed, "Our little gir . . . he hired . . . this you know, this . . . detective and he . . . Frank said ..." And she started crying and somebody had an arm twisting her hair the pain her shoulders elbows dislocating pulling hurting. "He was a private detective. Traskle or something like that, I swear . . . That's all I know. I don't know where Fr —"

"You did a no-no," the scarred man whispered. "You said I DON'T."

And she heard a raucous laugh as he made the lights go out.